


Not For Me

by Indygodusk



Category: Pitch Black (2000)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Sentinels and Guides Are Known, Character Study, F/M, Fewer people die, Fix-It, Romance, Sentinel/Guide Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:15:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25815667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Indygodusk/pseuds/Indygodusk
Summary: Pilot Carolyn Fry may have Guide gifts, but the only guiding she’s interested in doing is of spaceships. Not Sentinels. When a rogue comet damages her ship, she’s forced to crash land on an abandoned planet inhabited by monsters. Guide gifts on the fritz, she finds herself leading the people she’d almost killed, including two Sentinels she has trouble reading. Johns is a lawman and Riddick a criminal. The choice of who to trust should be simple. However, nothing and no one is quite what they seem in this place.
Relationships: Carolyn Fry/Richard B. Riddick
Comments: 19
Kudos: 46





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU fix-it fic and romance I wrote during the Rough Trade July 2020 Sentinel Challenge. I’m keeping Fry alive (with a few other people) and shipping Carolyn Fry/Riddick. I’m also adding in the Sentinel Trope (Sentinels with enhanced physical senses and Guides with empathy who bond together as lovers and tribal protectors with a bit of soulmates thrown in). See https://fanlore.org/wiki/Sentinel_AU . The events in this cover the first movie, but from Fry’s POV and with romance and more people surviving. Dialog in this story is a combination of original, paraphrased, and quoted directly from the movie depending on my needs in a scene. I hope you enjoy it!

They say that during cryo-sleep, everything shuts down between one blink and the next—everything but your most primitive, animal side. 

Carolyn Fry didn’t know if that was true for Mundanes, but it certainly seemed to be true for Sentinels and Guides. As a Guide she didn’t have it quite as bad, but cryosleep always left her feeling drained rather than well-rested. If she was unfortunate enough to be transporting a Sentinel in the passenger compartment of her ship, the discomfort became that much worse as her empathy picked up on their restlessness.

Sentinels and Guides were throwbacks from a distant time in human history when people lived in small groups on one planet and biology and trauma combined to bring Online tribal Sentinel protectors with enhanced physical senses and Guides with empathy to help balance a Sentinel’s senses. The instincts of Sentinels and Guides compelled them to seek out a spiritually compatible match and bond together to protect the tribe.

The future was a lot more complicated.

Instinct became inconvenient when tribes were replaced by continent-spanning metropolises and migration between farflung solar systems became a common event. Plus, only a fraction of the human population even possessed Sentinel/Guide gifts and the ability to access the spiritual plane. You were hardwired to want a bond and need to protect your tribe, but millenia of conflicting environmental pressures had diluted instincts enough for people to find workarounds. Drugs could mute the mental and physical punishment for subverting biological programming, but as with everything, there were negative side effects.

It hurt not to bond, but most of the so-called Gifted lived without one. A high bonding compatibility between Sentinels and Guides was rare and coveted. You could bond without that spiritual alignment, but most partnerships like that didn’t last. 

Carolyn Fry was an Online Guide and empath. She’d trained but never registered her name to be put into the pool of those interested in meeting other Gifted and bonding. Most Sentinels were cops and she had zero interest in law enforcement. She had no plans of changing that either despite the painfully achy feeling of emptiness that only a bond with a Sentinel could fill. Stubborn was her middle name. She had no interest in surrendering to biology. Her career as a docking pilot was more important than some muscle-bound lunk’s desire for a guide dog and she’d told that to the last three Sentinels who’d come sniffing around, trying to make her change her mind.

Although being unbonded was uncomfortable, being on suppression drugs felt even worse and slowed her reactions, which was dangerous in a spaceship pilot. To adapt, she built the strongest mental shields she could to protect herself against the emotions of others and allowed herself to view her three coworkers on the commercial transport ship Hunter-Gratzner as her tribe. The mental gymnastics mostly worked to protect her from her primitive instincts going haywire and the emotional neediness of the passengers pulling her in to try and protect them inconveniently. She was here to help herself and her friends, not random strangers. 

And if she sometimes dreamed of waking up from cryosleep to find an adventure with a handsome Sentinel by her side instead of the same old boring routine of shuffling passengers and cargo back and forth across the galaxy where she rarely saw more than the metal walls of her ship and the nearest port hotel and bar before going under cryo again, well, there was nothing wrong with dreams as long as you knew they were unrealistic. 

Until she was woken up abruptly halfway through a journey to see her ship being perforated with meteorites. The high-pitched popping sounds seemed so innocent compared to the sight of the holes blasting through the crew cryotubes across from her. In the flashing yellow emergency lights, the blood splattering the glass tubes looked violent orange. 

Captain Mitchell, a hard but fair man, never finished waking up. His eyes had just opened when he died. Carolyn's mouth fell open in a low grunt as she felt the mental tether she kept on him snap. 

Angela died seconds later. She’d never repay that bottle of wine and the ripped dress from their last leave together. 

Of her tribe and crew, only Owens was left. Their abrupt loss hit her like a knife shoved in the back. She struggled to breathe through the disorientation of waking early and pain of their loss.

Reeling from the backlash and completely unprepared, she felt her mental shields crack. Emotions from forty simultaneously waking, disoriented, and scared passengers assaulted her and tumbled her mind out of her body. She began spiralling, lost and overwhelmed. Empathic shock would kill her as surely as the meteorites but she couldn’t stop her fall into madness. 

Then her mind slammed into a silver shield. It felt like being struck by a gong. The impact had their souls resonating in harmony, a strange beauty in the midst of trauma and tragedy. The mind was strong, so incredibly strong despite the many obvious areas of damage. The silver shield encircled her mind tightly, pressing in on her indecently close and closing out everything else in an intimate protection and invasion that made her instinctively push back, but he—definitely a he—had her pinned. The pressure of the push and pull had the effect of sealing the cracks in her mental shields as she wiggled against his hold. She wiggled but a part of her had no interest in escaping.

In the blessed silence she could only feel his mind now: focused, surprised, and intrigued. His mind felt both dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful. He pulled at her like nothing else ever had and she got the feeling that it was mutual. A mind like that was a juggernaut, powerful, disciplined, and stubborn. He would never stop until he got what he wanted. 

What if he decided he wanted her? She would be possessed completely by his fire and find herself burned to ashes. She wouldn’t survive it. The idea scared her. 

The silver mind’s focus turned to disappointment, followed swiftly by boredom and dismissal. She tried to feel grateful instead of stung when he roughly shoved her away from his mind and out of the passenger compartment, slamming her mind back into her own body.

Disoriented and mentally raw, she had no way to catch herself as her cryotube popped open and dumped her on the floor. Owens, her co-pilot and only remaining empathic link, landed on top of her, equally confused and fixating on the unexpected presence of gravity. When they discovered that they’d fallen out of their shipping lane and been caught in a planet’s gravity well, she gave herself a single moment of panic before shoving everything from her mind but the need to survive and keep Owens, the last member of her tribe, safe.

As the ship fell into the planet’s atmosphere, she tried every trick she could think of, both in and out of the book, to stop their fall. She failed. Owens sent out a distress signal but mid-message the communications array snapped off in the heat and turbulence of atmospheric entry. The nose of the ship sliced through the sky, refusing to level off and give the ship any lift. At this rate she’d crash face-first into the planet and they’d all burn together. 

Unable to answer Owen’s demands for more information, trying not to feel his fear and desperation on top of her own, she deployed the main air brakes. The ship slowed, but not enough. Breathing heavy, she purged the cargo compartment and trillions of credits worth of goods. Her life was more important. Owens was more important. The ship jolted and the angle of re-entry corrected slightly, but not enough. 

“WHAT THE—was that a purge, Fry?!” Owens’s voice echoed through her com.

The entire ship rattled and her instruments screamed in warning. She hit more switches with minimal results. Sweat stung her eyes as she looked up at the red handle over her head, the handle that would purge the passenger compartment. “It wasn’t enough. I can’t get the nose up!”

“Try again! Try everything again!” he shouted.

“You know something I don’t, get up here and do it!” Licking her lips, she pulled her mental shields in close, blocking out everything she could. “I gotta dump more load.” Her hand moved up to touch the red handle. She didn’t know those people, not even the man belonging to that mesmerizing silver mind that both enticed and terrified her. She was a tribe of two. Owens was the only one she had to protect. Not strangers.

“You can’t just—” Owens pitch went high before stalling out. He started again with a bad attempt at sounding calm, “Look, the Company says we protect those passengers.”

“So we both die for a bunch of strangers because of the Company line? Screw that!”

“Don’t you touch that handle, Fry! Don’t you dare!”

Her hand lingered for another moment before she ripped it away and returned to other desperate and insane measures for trying to level out a ship never designed for emergency atmospheric entry. She had to kick several of the handles to get them to engage. They’d probably never been used since the ship had been built. She sealed every bulkhead she could to slow air loss and began opening exterior hatches. At last, with every airbrake and hatch open to create drag to slow descent and get the nose up, the ship finally started to level.

Then the hatches, not built to withstand such stresses, started shearing off. The shrapnel crashed into several airbrakes, taking out at least a quarter if not a third. The straps on her seat bit into her shoulders, bringing tears to her eyes. Bucking and squealing, the ship’s nose dipped sharply again, filling her window with a terrifyingly foreign yellow-grey landscape without a hint of open horizon. 

“Not gonna die for them.” Making up her mind, she reached up and pulled the red handle to purge the passenger compartment. 

An error bleeted from her screen. _Airlock doors not secure._ She pulled the handle again with the same message. 

“OWENS!” 

“These people are your tribe now. They depend on you to keep them safe and level out the ship, so do it!”

Swearing, Carolyn returned to her instruments, fighting the losing battle to get the nose up enough to survive. She hit a lucky pocket of air that gusted her sideways, allowing her to angle a fin enough to roll the nose up. It was all she had time to do before her windshield burst open, showering her with grit and pummeling her with the force of the air. The ship hit the ground and bounced, coming down again and skidding forward with the sound of a thousand interstellar engines firing. Throwing her arms in front of her face, she waited to die. 

* * *

She lived.

But of the forty passengers and four crew who’d boarded the Hunter-Gratzner, she could only feel the emotions of eleven other minds. Right then she didn’t care, not even that one of them was the silver mind from before. None of them mattered but for one: the last living member of her tribe. 

Fighting free of her seat straps, she went searching for Owens. She found him still at his station. He had a metal bar impaled through his chest next to his heart. She would’ve traded all of the survivors out back for Owens to be up and uninjured at that moment.

He woke up just enough to yell, “Don’t touch that handle!” before the waves of agony kept him from anything more than wet gasps and whimpers of pain. 

She asked one of the passengers to get her a shot of painkillers, but the med kit was gone along with the back half of the cabin wall. The presence of the passengers felt intrusive and grating. Their emotions felt so needy, pulling at her, but all of her strength was centered on Owens.

Ordering them out, she did the only thing she could to help her friend. She couldn’t save his life but she could make his death a little bit easier. Carolyn put her fingers on Owens’ face. Hands trembling, he grasped at her wrists. She dropped her shields and made herself vulnerable, merging their emotions and taking on half his pain as her own. Her chest burned and her muscles trembled with the pain. He clung to her comfort, still hurting but at least a little less, his skin going cold as blood drained out to pool beneath his body. As his breath rattled from his lungs for the last time, his soul rose from his flesh and flashed away into the plane of spirits like a supernova.

Not disengaging in time and without the spiritual protections enjoyed by a trained shaman, the experience overwhelmed her Guide gifts, singed her empathy, and knocked her unconscious. 

When Carolyn woke up, she was still slumped over Owens’s cooling body. As she closed his eyes for the last time and stood, she noticed that her mental shields were in tatters. It didn’t matter, however, because she couldn’t sense the emotions of the other survivors anymore, just a faint buzzing. It felt like trying to taste with a badly burned tongue. Hopefully it would heal in time.

She’d lost her tribe and her empathy. She had no ship to pilot. All she had was her life. 

But where there was life, there was hope. She was a survivor. One foot at a time, she had to move on. Standing up, she strode out into the harsh sunlight. 

* * *

When Johns slotted into place by her side as co-leader of their ragged band of survivors, she looked at his shiny gold badge with the light red stripe banded by the silver of a registered, unbonded Sentinel on suppression drugs and wondered if he’d been the silver mind she’d touched, if he’d been the wounded but strong Sentinel mind she’d felt so drawn to during the crash. He could be prickly, but they were all under a lot of pressure. He could also be charming, handsome, and heroic, doing his best to protect them all from a terrifying killer like Riddick. She really wished her empathy would come back so she could know what he was feeling behind the lazy smiles instead of just guessing. 

Part of her started to wonder if bonding with a Sentinel would really be that bad. An instinctual part of her spirit kept nudging at her that bonding was the only way she was going to survive this planet. Right now she was hurting and being wrapped in a pair of strong arms and a devoted and loving mind sounded really nice. She envied Shazza and Zeke for having each other as partners.

Until Zeke got killed in a hole in a ground and his body disappeared with Riddick as the only witness and probable murderer. 

Then she met Riddick in person and everything stopped making sense. 

“You better talk, because right now they’re debating if they should just kill you and stop worrying about you getting someone else,” she demanded, trying to stay on point and not get distracted staring at the imposing man tied between two posts in the wreckage of her ship. Something wasn’t adding up with Zeke’s death. “You told Johns you heard something?”

Sleek muscles bulged across his arms and chest, leading up to the kind of jawline that usually made her beeline for a man in a bar and take a nibble. His nose was too broad for conventional beauty and his full lips sensually cruel, yet she couldn’t look away or manage to catch her breath. Even restrained he exuded danger, power, and confidence. 

“You mean the whispers?” The sound of his voice just made it all worse, a darkly resonant tone best suited to dimly-lit bedrooms and midnight fantasies. 

“What whispers?”

“The ones telling me to go for the sweet spot just to the left of the spine. Fourth lumbar down. The abdominal aorta. It's a metallic taste, human blood. Copperish. If you cut it with peppermint schnapps, that goes—” 

“Do you want to shock me with the truth now?”

He was a killer, scary, irritating, and strangely magnetic, dangling the answers she wanted just out of reach, his words designed to shock and scare her, to take her measure.

“All you people are so scared of me. Most days, I take that as a compliment. But it ain't me you got to worry about now.”

“Then what?”

He just smiled faintly.

Carolyn was frustrated, terrified, and unwittingly turned on. Something about him drew her. She hated that he could get to her like this, hated even more that he seemed to sense it. She tried to access her empathy but it stayed frustratingly fuzzy, an aching buzz. With her gifts on the fritz she hadn’t even bothered telling the others she was a Guide. There was no point.

His eyes glinted strangely in the dark, calling to her. “Show me your eyes,” she demanded abruptly, tired of his games. 

“Come closer,” he tempted in that bedroom voice.

She couldn’t help but wipe sweaty palms down her thighs and obey, curiosity stronger than fear. When he lunged forward into the light, obviously intending to make her jump, she saw his eyes and felt a strange pull deep inside her chest. He obviously felt something too, because his smirk faltered and his eyes went wide, bridging attention to eyes covered with a sheen of silver, the same gorgeous silver as the mind she’d sensed just before the crash.

Breath catching, she felt frozen. She wanted to force him to deny it. He couldn’t be the silver Sentinel. Riddick was a convicted killer, for goodness sakes, a mass murdering sociopath according to Johns. She was taking coincidence too far. 

Carolyn didn’t know what she’d have done next if Jack hadn’t interrupted their stare-off to ask where to get eyes like that for himself. Riddick turned a charming smile on the kid and claimed he’d traded for the shine job from a prison doctor.

Once Jack left, Riddick returned to the main topic, catching her in those hypnotic silver eyes and leaning towards her against the pull of his chains. “Have I killed some people? Yes. Did I kill Zeke? No.”

God help her, despite everything she’d been told she believed him. “Then where is his body?”

“Look deeper,” he challenged, something in his face making her think he was talking about himself as well as Zeke.

But she didn’t want to look deeper at Riddick. His words fit with the clues, which meant that the only way to find the real killer and clear Riddick—not that clearing Riddick was as important compared to finding the truth for Zeke and the other passengers of course—was to go into the bloody hole where Zeke had disappeared and see for herself. 

She didn’t know if she was trying to prove something to the group, to Riddick, or to herself, but it was something she felt like she had to do if she wanted to look herself in the eye when this was all over (already a shaky prospect). 

The heavy and hot feeling of Riddick’s eyes on her back as she walked away lingered with her all of the way into the cool dark hole underground, a hole which turned out to be filled with monsters.


	2. Chapter 2

Despite being called captain, all of the big decisions seemed to be made by committee. Except for Johns’s handling of Riddick, it seemed. They’d just met to discuss supplies and the repair of the shuttle, only to be informed that Riddick was walking free among them in return for his promise to not hurt anyone. 

Unhappy with Johns deciding such a huge thing all on his own, Carolyn nevertheless realized that it was too late for her objections to mean anything. No one elses had. She made sure everyone had their duties and dismissed the meeting. Everyone quickly scattered. 

When Carolyn looked over her shoulder, she saw Shazza blocking Riddick from leaving. Curious and worried for the other woman, Carolyn hid in the open doorway to watch. 

Shazza firmed her jaw and met Riddick’s eyes boldly. “Here.” She tossed him her oxygen canister and tubing. They’d been using hits of oxygen to help people acclimate to the thinner atmosphere of the planet, but the supply had quickly run out.

Carolyn was impressed by Shazza’s courage and kindness, considering that during their last interaction Shazza had accused Riddick of killing Zeke and then kicked him in the head so hard she’d knocked him unconscious. A man might hold a grudge about that.

Catching the gift, Riddick’s face went flat. He tossed the breather onto the floor at Shazza’s feet with a curl of his lip. “What? Is it broken?”

Sucking in air through her teeth, Shazza put a hand on her hip and exhaled hard. “No, you ass, there’s a few hits of oxygen left. It’s an apology.” 

Even without her empathy working right, Carolyn could see what was going on. She was impressed. Shazza wasn’t offering the oxygen as an insult or bribe to make Riddick leave her alone, she was making the offer because her personal honor demanded it and she was a fundamentally kind person, despite her gruff exterior and temper, a temper now pricked by his response. Glaring, Shazza shoved the tubing back towards Riddick with her boot, tossed her head to get her wild black curls out of her face, and stomped away, not acknowledging Carolyn hiding in the doorway.

Riddick looked wary, obviously unused to receiving gifts or apologies. Bending over, he picked up the tubing and stared at it for a long moment, muscles tight, before carefully hanging it over his shoulder. The corner of his mouth tilted down, almost a vulnerable expression.

It made something in Carolyn’s chest ache. She slipped away before Riddick could notice her watching and misunderstand. And before she saw something else that made her care more than she should about a man like that.

Outside in the blazing sun, she felt a renewed urgency. Formulating plans in her head, she went to find Johns to get him to help coordinate bringing up all five power cells for the shuttle. 

Instead of meeting her urgency with her own, Johns was adamant that they wait until the last minute. When pressed for reasons, he told her it was so Riddick didn’t stab them all in the back, kill her, and pilot the shuttle away all by himself like he’d done during his escape from prison. Done talking, Johns turned his back on her and walked away.

It put her in a foul mood. 

Choosing to focus on what was in her control, she turned to the problem of patching up the wings and hull of the decrepit shuttle to make it air-tight and space-worthy. The work was exhausting and took a headache-inducing amount of ingenuity over the next few days or weeks (it was hard to keep track of days when there was no night out here). She had to scavenge debris from both the crashed ship and the mining colony. 

Despite Johns ordering Riddick around like a dog and giving him several tasks to keep him away from the shuttle, Riddick chose to interpret his orders liberally and joined her in her scavenging efforts when Johns was too busy to notice or do anything about it. She wasn’t naive enough to believe he was helping purely out of the goodness of his heart. He wanted out of here as much as she did and was probably trying to figure out a way to do it without relying on the rest of them. 

Though that didn’t explain why he was always watching her and why the tension in his shoulders ratcheted down a notch when she joined the group and found him already there. Although her presence seemed to make the tension in his shoulders unwind, he had the opposite effect on her body. Having Riddick always watching her from the periphery unsettled her in ways she didn’t want to examine too closely, making her pulse jump and sweat trickle down her spine. They worked mostly in silence but she felt anything but peaceful. He intimidated her, which she resented. He also intrigued her, which she resented even worse.

Every time she switched buildings when his back was turned, his nostrils flared and his head tilted. Combined with his claims to see in the dark and how far he could see even when wearing tinted goggles, plus how he’d heard the monsters underground who’d taken Zeke, the conclusion was as obvious as it was incomprehensible: Riddick had to be an Online Sentinel with enhanced senses. Was her Guide aura unconsciously helping his Sentinel relax and even out his senses in an alien environment? She wanted to feel resentful, but instead just felt more confused. 

Just as well they weren’t alone to talk since Jack was still tagging along after Riddick with his strange case of hero-worship. If they had been alone she’d have asked Riddick about being a Sentinel and probably gotten more than she’d bargained for with his reply, considering their last private interaction and how he dominated conversations when he chose to talk. She was already dealing with more crap than she wanted to right now. She didn't need the extra stress. 

Like kids. Kids were stressful. Without direct orders, Jack quickly got bored with scavenger work and got the other boys to play annoying games nearby. It necessitated them jumping out and startling her constantly, intermixed with sharing the “exciting” discoveries they were making with their “beloved Captain.” They were just kids, but her patience was already paper-thin, her emotional shields fragile, and her empathy buzzing painfully and not giving her anything useful. It made her snappy. When she snapped, the kids got this obviously hurt expression on their faces that just made her feel worse. They’d wander off for a while but the next day they were back at it again, helping a little and annoying her a lot.

Once she’d gathered everything useful and got to the point of actually patching up the wings and interior of the shuttle, her helpers vanished. Riddick disappeared to who knows where, Jack got conscripted by Shazza, and Imam took away the boys for scripture school. It left her alone in silence to focus. She told herself that she liked the quiet. It was true for the first hour, but after that, she started getting bored. Once she figured out a plan to patch up the ship, most of the actual repair work boiled down to forcing two different puzzles to fit together into one picture through the liberal application of scissors and glue. 

Boredom turned into brooding.

The way everyone kept calling her Captain and looking at her so needily was starting to get to her. She was a pilot and a loner except for her small crew. She wasn’t supposed to be Captain. The pressure of their expectations wasn’t something she wanted to carry. Carolyn wasn’t their Captain, she was the selfish person who’d tried to kill them all to save herself and Owens. They’d been faceless strangers at the time, but she’d failed to save Owens because he’d still chosen to put the lives of strangers above letting her save the two of them. She was mostly more grateful than mad about that nowadays since these people weren’t strangers anymore.

Carolyn didn’t want to think of herself as a bad person. She didn’t want to keep carrying around shame for what she’d done. However, her attempt to redeem herself by showing she cared and going down to look for Zeke’s body hadn’t done any good. It had only almost gotten her killed and uncovered a nightmare monster. Those monsters had killed Zeke, all the people who used to live here, and even gotten Ali, Imam’s youngest boy, once they moved into the settlement. 

Another reason not to get attached to anyone here when people were still dying. 

The few snatches of sleep she’d gotten in this ever sunlit place were filled with dreams of her death and a premonition that bonding with a Sentinel was the only way she’d survive to get off the planet. Carolyn Fry might be a Guide, but she didn’t trust in dream premonitions, especially those designed to make her biological instincts happier than her intellect. She didn’t want to bond to Johns. Or Riddick. Though a cop like Johns was a better choice than a convict if she really had to, right? Her emotions warred with her logic. She told them both to shut up. Sometimes a dream was just a dream. 

Fry didn’t want to become responsible for caring for and protecting a new Tribe so soon after losing her last one. Their loss still hurt. Unfortunately, it was hard not to care about people once you knew their faces and stories. It was doubly hard when they seemed determined to have you as the head of their ad-hoc family with or without your input. When this was all over it would be hard to forget Imam’s prayers and optimism, the boys’ curiosity and strength, Shazza’s dreams for a new home, Jack’s bravado, Paris’s ramblings about art history (and alcohol), and the way Johns used to let her get things off her chest without condemning her (though her recent talks with him had lost much of their earlier ease). 

Not to mention Richard B. Riddick. She didn’t know how to categorize their interactions except to say that Riddick wasn’t a man you quickly forgot. Despite how he still scared her, she also found him funny and smart, with a dry wit and intelligent observations. She wouldn’t want to get trapped alone with him in an enclosed space, but she found herself liking him despite herself. This planet with its three suns and neverending daylight really was driving her crazy.

It didn’t matter though because she was going to protect her heart from all of them. She was not going to imprint on these people and allow herself to be hurt when she lost them, especially not Sentinels like Riddick and Johns. She’d flirted with the thought of bonding to Johns when it wasn’t physically possible, but now with her empathy closer to coming back Online and his suppression drugs surely running out, bringing him back Online too, she felt less and less willing to make herself that vulnerable. The more she got to know Johns, the less he felt like the partner she’d told herself to stop looking for but secretly still hoped to find. She certainly had no interest in quitting her job to follow after him, not that working for the Company was all that great, but she had no desire to become an intergalactic cop. And Riddick was a convicted criminal, which made him impossible too, not that she’d want him even if it was possible. Of course not.

No, these people were not going to be her new Tribe. She would not be responsible for their fate. They were just people working together for the common goal of getting off this rock before the sun went down and those monsters swarmed to the surface and killed everyone. She cared about them in a general sense because that was a normal human reaction to being around people in a survival situation like this, but nothing more. Once they got back up in the black they could all go back to being strangers with no hard feelings… couldn’t they? 

Okay, she might be lying to herself. However, sometimes you had to lie to yourself to get through the day. She told herself that if she could just get the shuttle up and running and everyone rescued, it would kill the guilt living in her gut since the crash. Then even if they found out what she’d done and rejected her, she could move on and sleep peacefully again knowing she’d redeemed herself. 

Though even if she did exorcise that particular demon, she had a horrible feeling that a new guilt would take its place. Johns’s plan to backstab Riddick and not set him free once they got out of here was going to haunt her. She wanted to trust in Johns, but he seemed to be hiding so much behind those pale blue eyes. If only her empathy would hurry up and fix itself! She couldn’t read if Johns was telling her the truth and was starting to suspect that he was playing her just like he was playing Riddick. 

But why?

Choosing the side of a convicted killer over that of a cop would be the height of stupidity. Carolyn Fry did not get this far by being stupid. She could only hope that once her Guide gifts came back Online she’d feel better about the situation and be able to chalk Riddick’s return to prison as necessary for protecting the Tribe, whoever her new Tribe ended up being.

Guides were meant to bring harmony to Sentinels. Together they protected the Tribe and dispensed justice, at least that’s the story she’d believed in wholeheartedly as a girl, even if she’d given up on finding a worthy partner or the fairy-tale of justice as an adult. Johns was a Sentinel (albeit a suppressed one, though once again he had to be switching Online any day now since without refrigeration his suppressants had to have spoiled). She should feel good about partnering with him and trusting in his duty to protect others as an intergalactic cop. If he knowingly betrayed the Tribe by using his gifts unjustly or to hurt instead of protect the vulnerable, his gifts would go Dormant and punish him with the pain of their loss. That’s what she’d been taught, though admittedly she’d figured out how to work around the rules a bit when choosing to define the people in and out of her tribe to minimize her own instincts.

So how did she explain Riddick? He had to be an Online Sentinel. She found herself watching him more than she should. Despite being a convicted killer dragged back to prison after escaping on a hijacked prison transport, he hadn’t gone dormant. That should be impossible, especially because he didn’t seem to have any tribal instincts. Everything she knew said that Riddick should be Dormant. Instead, he had physical senses so advanced she’d only heard of something similar spoken of sheepishly in stories about mythically strong Alpha Sentinel Primes out on the frontier. He was clearly stronger, faster, and tougher than normal humans, and his sight, smell, and hearing exceeded any other Sentinel she’d ever seen or heard about.

Riddick’s story about getting a surgical shine job on his eyes to see in the dark made no sense either. Over the years in spaceport bars she’d met her share of special ops soldiers surgically modified for wet work in dark places. Eyes didn’t work like that without obvious external cybernetic prosthetics and regular doses of maintenance drugs. 

She didn’t know much of Riddick’s history except for what Johns had told them and the little morsels Riddick let slip, but the more she saw and sensed from Riddick, the more she felt completely confused. Her instincts were telling her that Riddick was a dangerous killer, yes, but also that he was an inherently honorable and just man who’d rarely seen justice. She got the feeling that he liked scaring people because fear was the only way he’d ever gotten any respect. Yet since the chains had come off he’d kept his word about being helpful and not harming anyone. He was kind to the children when he couldn’t avoid them and rarely lost his temper or raised his voice (outside of interacting with Johns). As far as she could tell, he hadn’t even lied to them about anything except for maybe the story about his eyes. 

He had so much control it was stunning, yet at the same time he exuded the energy of a feral animal so used to receiving and meting out violence that death had become commonplace. She had a feeling he could and would stab anyone who got in the way of his freedom, but that if you showed him your throat and lowered your eyes he wouldn’t bother you. Unfortunately for her safety, she had a big mouth and difficulty lowering her eyes to anyone. 

Riddick scared her. He could hurt her and not even care. Violence was such a big part of his nature that she would be stupid to ever discount him as a threat and label him safe. And yet... she felt drawn to him. She secretly wondered if any Guide had the power to bring peace to such a primitive and scarred Sentinel. Of what it would feel like to be needed by such a man. The challenge of it was enticing. Seductive. 

Suicidal. 

Personal survival was a whole lot more important than indulging in her curiosity. If she didn’t get this ship fixed, worrying about which Sentinel to trust more so she could live with herself was a moot point. They’d all die down here, either killed by the monsters or killed by each other. Focusing on that cheerful thought, she returned to her repairs. 

After several days of work, Johns finally agreed to bring up a single power cell for a hull integrity and systems check on the shuttle. He flatly refused to do more. Carolyn argued herself hoarse about bringing all five power cells up and just setting a guard to make sure Riddick didn’t sneak on board and steal the shuttle, stranding the rest of them there, but Johns wouldn’t budge. He told her one and that was that. It made her so frustrated.

She’d argue more but Johns had a way of playing up her fears as they spoke, reminding her that Riddick was a killer who’d most recently killed another pilot and making her doubt her own judgment. For all she knew Johns was right to be so cautious, but she was just so done with his hot and cold attitude. He didn’t seem to care about the rest of them and it felt like nothing but keeping Riddick in line could motivate him to exert himself. How could he not be in a rush to leave? She was so sick of being stranded on this planet. 

The model of the local solar system they’d found showed an eclipse of the planet dated twenty-two years ago this month. Riddick had theorized (very convincingly) that the settlement had been slaughtered by the creatures living underground during that eclipse. The sooner they got out of here the better. She did not want to be around when all three suns went dark and those monsters came up to hunt.

Doing the hull-integrity test on the shuttle was her next step in getting out of here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter is the shuttle scene. I love the shuttle scene and will be making it even more steamy!


	3. Chapter 3

Shazza drove those who wanted to come along to and from the wreck in the sandcat to retrieve the single power cell for the test. Back at the shuttle everyone quickly got bored of watching Fry swear over fittings not working the way she’d hoped and left her alone to her work. Making the shuttle agree to take the power cells from the Hunter-Gratzner took some creative programming and a newly rewired housing console, but she finally got the two systems to integrate and set it up so the other cells could be quickly and easily installed later.

Holding her breath, she flicked the power switch. With a buzz and rattle the screens lit up and the environmental systems started expelling years of sand from the vents and filters. “That’s right!” she gloated, flicking more switches. Everything looked good. She licked her lips and blew out a breath. “Time for the moment of truth.” 

Closing the hatch, she started the hull integrity test. If the shuttle wasn’t airtight it wouldn’t keep them alive in space. She wished she could do a main drive run-up too but would have to wait on the other four power cells. “C’mon, work,” she encouraged, flipping switches and checking readouts. Shoving back her chair, she pivoted to her feet to check the systems in the back and jerked to a stop in shock, gulping. 

Like a ghost, Riddick stood in the heavy shadows at the back of the cabin. With his goggles on she couldn’t see the expression in his eyes, but from the set of his shoulders and the slight curve of his lips in the faint light coming through the forward windshield he seemed pleased with himself and her strong reaction. 

She was locked in here with him all alone until the shuttle tests finished. He must’ve planned this. Why? Since he could hear her racing heartbeat she didn’t bother hiding the scared and wary expression on her face. What was the point?

“Looks like you’re a few short,” his voice rumbled from the shadows and rubbed across her body like ice-cold velvet, making her hair stand on end in both discomfort and pleasure. She pressed her lips tight and told her body to get with the program. Riddick was scary, not sexy. 

“Power cells,” he drawled, stalking forward slowly like she was prey that might bolt at any second. Of course, with the hatch locked there was nowhere for her to bolt to to avoid getting eaten. She wished that was a euphemism, but the closer he got the more she heard Johns’s threats echoing in her mind about all the ways Riddick would kill them if he ever got the chance. Her heart was trying to jump out of her chest as sweat beaded and slid down her skin, pooling in the hollow of her throat. His nostrils flared and his lips parted, making it obvious he noticed her reaction, noticed and liked it.

It made her mad. Carolyn Fry was not any man’s prey. “They’re coming,” she said evenly, reaching up and switching off the monitor overhead so he wouldn’t be able to see how the peripheral systems fared during the test. The monitor with atmospheric integrity was on the main screen behind her but at least it was partially blocked by her body. She didn’t care if she was being petty.

Despite the dimness of the cabin, Riddick kept his goggles on. It made him seem robotic and almost inhuman. It wouldn’t bother her as much if she could sense his emotions. She should be healed by now but her gifts had gotten stuck just out of alignment. They constantly buzzed like a fly stuck between a windowpane and curtain.

“It seems strange not to bring all the cells up to test the main drive. Unless…” Riddick trailed off.

As he moved closer she felt more and more claustrophobic. She flipped a few more switches overhead to keep herself busy and tried to slide around him towards the back of the cabin where there was more room. Riddick moved into her path, stepping onto the open floor panels and closing them with a  _ BANG BANG _ that rattled her bones and made her jump.

“...he told you how I escaped. Is that what happened, Carolyn?”

Stomach tight, she put a hand on the back of the pilot’s chair. “We’re naturally worried about a repeat. Can you promise we don’t have to be?” Reaching out for his emotions got her nothing but an increase in the buzz and a spike of pain in her head. Abandoning that tact, she went to search his eyes instead and saw only the black surface of his goggles and the pale reflection of her face.

Riddick tilted his head and leaned forward to loom over her. “What do you think? Can you trust my promises? Can I trust in yours?” He examined her face.

She didn’t think he even cared about her answers, he just wanted to get a reaction. It made her want to hit him, especially because some stupidly instinctual part of her wanted to answer yes to his questions. She’d rather punch him than give him the satisfaction. Of course, hitting him might make him snap and slit her throat so she wisely restrained the impulse. 

“Why do you care what I think? Do you want me to say you scare me? Because you do. You scare me, Riddick.” She looked at him evenly. “So can I get back to work now?” 

She could tell that her forthright answer was making him rethink his next response. Hoping to knock him further off guard, she gave him her back and moved forward, checking the monitor and turning on another system to see if the single power cell could handle the load. The hull integrity test was only at thirty-five percent. She silently urged it to go faster.

“Most of your work is already done while the test runs. Besides, I have been meaning to catch up with you alone,” she could feel him moving closer, “unrestrained.” He stepped to the side where she couldn’t avoid seeing him and braced his arm just behind her head. If she turned to look over her shoulder her cheek would press against his bulging bicep. She wished he would move back and stop crowding her. He smelled spicy and male.

“Do you think I can trust Johns? Trust in  _ his _ promises to cut me loose?”

Looking away, stomach dropping, she swallowed and fought to keep her voice steady. “Why? What’ve you heard? He’s a Sentinel, isn’t he?”

“Is he?” Riddick hummed thoughtfully, dropping his arm and moving around behind her until she could feel the heat of his body almost pressing up against her back. “I guess if he were an Online Sentinel he’d do the just thing and ghost me. Kill me for the good of the tribe. But,” he leaned forward until she could feel his hot breath fanning along her cheek, “the payday for me is twice as much if he brings me in alive.”

Flustered and uncomfortable, her mind raced, trying to make sense of his words while ignoring his proximity. 

“Didn’t you know? Johns ain’t a cop. He’s a merc.” The push of breath as he pronounced that hard C made her hair blow back from her neck and sent a shiver down her spine as certain things began falling horribly into place. “His nickel-slick badge is as fake as his suppressed Sentinel status.” Riddick slid to her other side to speak more awful words into her ear, the heat of his body bringing an uncontrolled flush to her cheeks even as the implications chilled her to the bone. “Sure he takes drugs, but not for that. You should ask him why you had to blow out your gifts helping your buddy die in only slightly less agonizing pain. Ask him why he’s more worried about keeping his payday alive than about keeping this little tribe safe, more worried about me than about keeping a Guide like you safe and... satisfied.” The way he lingered on the word  _ satisfied _ sent a tingle down her back that felt too scorching to be blamed entirely on fear. “Greed is his god and the only thing he protects is his bank balance.”

“ _ Don’t _ waste my time,” she said sharply, holding herself rigid and trying not to think about the implications of what he’d just said about Johns because she didn’t want Riddick to know how much he was getting to her. “I’m not turning on anyone for  _ you _ .”

He didn’t flinch at her words, but the way he went abruptly still and the hitch in the breath sliding across her skin were their own clues. 

After a moment he slid even closer if that was possible. He obviously had no concept of personal space. “Maybe not for me… maybe not for those people out there,” her hair caught and slid along his stubbled cheek as he drawled huskily against her jaw, “but a Guide without a tribe needs to look after herself. You gotta do what you gotta do to survive, am I right?”

Pricked, she closed her eyes and scrambled for a reply. “You only know I’m a Guide because you’re a Sentinel.”

“Well, you know what they say about people like you and me…” trailing off, he finally slid back and gave her some breathing room. She could feel her hair catching and falling away from his jaw.

Fisting her hand, she pressed it against her aching middle. She didn’t need to think about what “they” said. It wouldn’t help. Eyes opening, she looked over at the computer screen. Everything was looking good, but the hull integrity test was still only at eighty-one percent. Before she could second guess herself, she swung around. “How long’s it been since you even had a Tribe, Riddick?”

Expression going blandly pleasant, he shrugged. “Too long to bother remembering.”

“Don’t you ever miss it? Being a part of something bigger than yourself?”

“There’s no point. I wouldn’t even know what to do with a Tribe at this point. I use my senses to protect myself: a Tribe of one. You understand that. Besides,” he leaned an arm against the wall, “if the lights go out and we’re still stuck down here, this psycho little family of ours is gonna tear itself apart.”

“We’re not getting stuck down here and they’re good people.” She wanted to disagree more but feared he was only speaking the truth. After all, she’d held back from bonding to any of them herself. It made her feel guilty all over again and terribly alone. She missed the comforting empathic tethers she’d used to check in on her crewmates. They were all gone now. The buzzing headache that never quite went away since her empathy overloaded spiked painfully. Looking away, she pressed her fingers against her temple and rubbed, trying to massage away some of the pain. 

“You know… I could fix that for you.” Riddick’s words sounded breezy but his body, when she looked back, was coiled tightly with tension. His fingers drummed against the side of his leg in time to the pulsing pain in her head.

“Fix what?” she asked wearily, tired of his games.

“Your headache, the one caused by your empathy. I can sense that it’s out of joint.” He tapped the ceiling with his knuckles and then tucked the fingers of both hands into the bar overhead, leaning forward between his arms. “Your aura just needs to be nudged back into place.” He tipped his head to the side enticingly.

“And you know how to do that?” She looked him up and down skeptically, not letting her eyes linger on the spread of his body. One of these days he was going to catch the arousal mixed in with her terror and probably become even more insufferable. Dragging her eyes away, she checked the monitor again. Ninety percent. So close to being done.

“I know better than your boy Johns.”

“He’s not my boy,” she snapped, glaring over her shoulder at him.

Riddick’s teeth flashed in a smug little smile. “Good.”

Irritated at letting him get that much from her, she crossed her arms. “What’s it gonna cost me?”

“Nothing too difficult. It’s been impossible to ignore your disharmony since we landed, so fixing it would be a relief. And of course, as a Sentinel, the comfort of a Guide is my biological imperative.” His voice slid down as smooth, sweet, and thick as whipped cream. A muscle in his chest jumped, drawing her eyes to the impressive shape of his body braced against the low ceiling and straining towards her, restrained only by his will. She wished he would wear something less form-fitting than the cargo pants and skin-tight tank top, maybe a loose robe and cape topped by a face-scarf so she wouldn’t have to be tempted by that jawline anymore.

“What then?” she asked.

“A kiss.”

Carolyn choked, arms dropping to her sides as her eyes jumped up to his face. It took a second to clear her throat enough to talk. “Excuse me?”

“I have to touch you to fix you.” He flashed her a crooked smile.

“Then why not just use your hands instead of your lips?”

“Where’s the fun in that? Though I am a primitive Sentinel and you’re a beautiful and injured Guide. If I get my hands on you, my inconvenient animal instincts might just take over and insist on not letting you go until I’ve touched you everywhere to reacquaint myself with the curves of a woman and check for possible bonding compatibility. That could lead to a need to see, scent, and taste all your secret places when touch compatibility turns up negative.”

She did her best to scowl at him and ignore the tingles racing across her skin at his rumbled words and bedroom eyes as he continued.

“‘Course, there’s no way I’m fit to be compatible or bond with any Guide, so I might just keep going until I’m completely glutted and we’re both physically satisfied that a bond is impossible. That could take a while as I’ve got a lot of stamina and pent-up tension. However, I’m willing to go through it and bear the consequences if you are?” He slid up his goggles to reveal those bewitching silver eyes and tilted his head temptingly, the tip of his tongue peeking out to moisten the corner of his lip.

It didn’t matter how his words and actions made her joints and other places go liquid with heat. She didn’t trust him. “No.”

He shrugged and rocked back on his heels, hands still braced overhead. “Then a kiss is your best bet. Taste is the easiest sense for me to control. A kiss for me, a return to empathy for you, and we both go away satisfied. I even promise to act the gentleman.”

“A gentleman?” she scoffed weakly, feeling breathless.

“Tick-tock, time’s running out. When that hatch opens,” he canted his head towards the back, “I’m leaving. You can take that as a promise or a threat, but if you want me to fix your mind you better make up your mind quickly.” He shrugged, muscles rippling up and down his body in the dappled shadows. “I don’t care much either way, I just have a policy of not doing things for free.”

This was so crazy and stupid, but she needed her Guide gifts back. She needed them. Operating without empathy was like being blind and trying to pilot a ship with one arm tied behind her back. “Okay, you get one kiss as part of fixing me.” She held up her hand, “You don’t move anything but your mouth or I knee you in the groin and have you singing soprano in the prison choir, deal?”

“Sure, one kiss. I’ll even keep my hands where they are. You, on the other hand, are welcome to touch as much of me as you’d like, Carolyn.” As Riddick’s shoulders carefully relaxed downward, the tilt of his head revealed a gleam in his eyes. “And if you get greedy and try to take extra kisses, I won’t hold it against you.”

She realized with surprise that he wanted this more than he’d been letting on. It should make her more wary. Instead, it just made her more curious and a bit excited. Her curiosity was definitely going to get her killed one of these days. He still scared her but now she couldn’t get the thought of kissing him out of her head.

Breathing in deeply, he lowered his head and waited for her to make the first move. “You smell good… excited,” his eyes flicked down her body and she flushed at being caught out. “I like that.”

“Inconvenient animal instincts and biological imperatives, remember?” she muttered, stepping forward and bracing a hand on the nearest seatback. “Don’t forget to fix my empathy while we do this.” Licking her lips brought his eyes arrowing down to her lips. She paused, the tension thick in the space between their bodies. This time it was definitely more sexy than scary. His lips parted with a soft, slick sound that felt loud in the waiting silence.

Carolyn felt a burst of boldness. Why was she blushing and hesitating when she’d already agreed to go through with this? The terms were clear and in her favor. She should just do it. 

Leaning forward, she abruptly changed her mind about the simple peck on the corner of his mouth she’d intended to deliver. If this was to be her only chance, she should make the most of it. Tilting her head, she pressed her open mouth to his lips. They gave under the pressure of her mouth, widening slowly and inviting her further inside. Their lips glanced off each other, slipping and sliding deeper and deeper. Her mind shut down and her body took over. A softly pleased rumble vibrated from his chest and through her body. She’d expected force from his kiss and instead faced a teasing resistance that had her trying to coax him into a bigger reaction by sliding the tip of her tongue inside his upper lip. Groaning, he finally responded, catching her lips hard and pressing them wider, deepening the kiss into something that rocked her to her very foundations.

Although Riddick’s hands stayed locked into place overhead, she felt slowly circled on the spirit plane by his silver shields, slipping over between one second and the next. 

His shields quieted the constant buzzing and grinding of her misfiring gifts. Being shielded by someone else was an enormous relief she’d rarely experienced in her life. It was intimate and amazing. Usually it only happened during training when you first came Online and when bonding to a Sentinel. In the peace and quiet she could see that her spirit was just slightly out of phase with her body. She tried to bring them back together but couldn’t get her spirit to cooperate. 

Frustrated, she felt something stalk up behind her. Before she could turn, large and deadly paws fell onto the back of her shoulders and leaned. The spirit animal was careful not to do more than prick her with his sharp claws as she grunted beneath the weight. He wasn’t hers, so he had to belong to Riddick. She’d never met anyone else’s spirit animal before but didn’t let herself take that thought to its logical conclusion. Instead, she shifted and centered herself so as not to collapse. She would not be knocked down by his weight. She was strong enough to carry him. Just like that, her spirit and body clicked back into place. Riddick’s spirit animal nuzzled against her jaw, slid off her back, and disappeared.

Gifts once more Online, she returned to the present, her time on the spirit plane taking place between one moment and the next. However, because she was still inside Riddick’s shields she had no protection from the full force of his desire. He wanted—no— _ needed _ more from her but was hanging on to his promise not to touch her by a thin but diamond-hard thread. “Caro,” he breathed against her lips, “please.”

Unable to help herself, Carolyn moaned and surged forward into his mouth. The slick heat of his tongue sent her pulse skyrocketing and made her knees weak. Dropping her hand from the chair, she slid it up over the silky hard flesh of his upper chest and hooked it around his neck, pressing her curves flush against his hard body. It still wasn’t enough. She needed to be closer. She shifted and hooked a leg around his thigh. They both groaned, feeling the perfect way their bodies and minds slotted into place. 

Fisting her hand in the sweat-soaked fabric of his shirt, she used the hand already behind his neck to pull down his face and dragged her lips across his jaw the way she’d been fantasizing about for days. Unable to help herself, she sucked on the hinge and sank in her teeth. Cursing reverently, Riddick pressed into her mouth. She mouthed the small wound and continued her explorations of his skin. 

Riddick licked the line of sweat trickling down her cheek with a thoroughness that let her know he was memorizing her taste and texture. Pressing whispered praises and filthy encouragements into her skin, he dragged his open mouth across her temple and over her brow before returning to plunder her mouth with salt-tinged kisses. 

Opening wide for his assault, Carolyn gave as good as she got. She’d never been kissed like this, never felt such instant chemistry and perfect harmony of desire. His every sense was focused on her as she stoked the fires of his arousal with every trick in her arsenal, his pleasure doubling and tripling her own. It was perfect. He was perfect.

Too perfect.

Ripping her mouth away, she fell off his body and stumbled back, falling into the pilot seat and forcing herself to not reach out for him again. 

Riddick snarled and lunged for her, pivoting at the last moment to slam his hands palm-first onto the wall of the ship. Panting, he dropped his head between his arms. It took over a minute for him to speak, his voice a raspy gravel, “What was that? What did you do to me?” A silver-eyed glare shot her way, hinting at violence.

Realizing he was unconsciously matching his breathing to hers, she felt her stomach knot. “I didn’t do anything,” she said with a tremble in her voice. Swallowing, she straightened her spine and met him glare for glare, threat for threat. “We’re… we’re compatible,” she spat at him.

Riddick retreated three quick steps before jerking to a stop. Staring at her wide-eyed, he slowly shook his head and clenched his teeth. A muscle jumped in his jaw. “That’s impossible,” he said lowly.

“Obviously not.” Uncomfortable sitting down and looking up at him, she stood up and tucked her hair behind her ears. “It doesn’t have to mean anything. So we’re compatible to bond. So what? This doesn’t change anything.”

With a clank and hiss, the atmospheric test finally ended and the hatch at the back opened, flooding the cabin with light and the taste of desert air. Silhouetted against the light, Riddick reached up and pulled his dark goggles back over his eyes, the lover turning back into the menacing stranger. “I’m a Sentinel. Lies are pointless between us.” Turning, he quickly and silently disappeared out the door into the harsh sunlight, leaving her with bruised lips and a head spinning with questions.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shuttle scene number two. Oh Pitch Black, how I love you so! I changed a few plot things here and will change a few more in the next and final chapter to keep people from dying and to make this a romance with a happy ending. Thanks to everyone who reads and leaves me lovely comments!

Since Carolyn didn’t even know where to start in tackling the implications of that kiss, she skipped instead on Riddick’s initial words. Could she really be so blind about Johns? Who was he really? 

Maybe it shouldn’t matter since the shuttle had passed the hull integrity test and they should be good to leave once the rest of the power cells got here. Once back up in space and rescued, she’d never have to see Johns again. Or Richard B. Riddick… who’d probably end up betrayed and back in prison, seeing no one.

The smart thing would be to put her head down and look to her own six. Getting between Johns and Riddick would be suicidal. Carolyn was a survivor, not stupid.

But what if Johns had lied to her? She’d trusted him, even shared with him her secret shame. She had to confront him about this. Riddick was merely the catalyst, not the reason, she told herself. This was about her and Johns. No one had the right to walk all over her. She would not be a puppet with easy-to-pull strings. Not for Johns and not for Riddick. She would find out the truth and go from there.

Shutting down the shuttle systems, she set her jaw and went searching. She couldn’t find Johns in the usual places, but Suleiman and Hassan, who were playing some mysterious game involving rocks, bones, and a grid scratched in the dirt, finally directed her to a small building on the edge of the settlement. 

By that time her righteous anger had muted into doubt. She was so tired of this planet and the tension created by these people. Maybe she just needed a good night's sleep to put her relationship to both Sentinels into perspective. Maybe Johns was exactly as he seemed and the one who’d been manipulating her really was Riddick after all.

Carolyn pushed open the door and jerked to a stop at the sight before her eyes. Her stomach dropped. She’d thought she’d braced herself for this conversation and knew what to expect. She’d been wrong. 

Not pausing at her presence, Johns tipped back his head and inserted a needle into the corner of his eye, a dangerous but popular spot for hypes or hard-core drug users. Depressing the syringe, he winced and shuddered. Seconds later he gave a whole body sigh and relaxed back in his chair with a blissed out smile. With her Guide gifts back Online, she could feel his relief as the drugs flooded his system, dulling his physical pains and causing euphoria. 

To add to her shock, there was no instinctual pull on her empathy to soothe Johns’s Sentinel. His mind wasn’t enticing, it was off-putting, with what felt like a lesion where his Sentinel gifts should be, a wound not caused by any suppression drugs. 

Carolyn felt unsteady. “So who are you really?” The feelings of apathy and disdain she felt from him as he glanced over at her hurt. She hardened her heart. “You’re not a cop, are you?”

“I never said I was,” he answered, unconcerned.

Carolyn walked over and looked down at the open ammunition box. The red casings were mostly full of drugs and needles instead of bullets. “No, you didn't.” 

She was so stupid. She’d created this whole persona of Johns out of assumptions and desperation-fueled dreams. She’d seriously considered bonding with him and he probably didn’t even know she was a Guide. He probably wouldn’t care even if he did know. His Sentinel gifts weren't suppressed, they were Dormant because he was too selfish and corrupt. “You never said you were a hype either.”

“Some people wake up with caffeine, some with morphine. So what?”

“So what?! Those drugs could’ve helped Owens so he didn’t have to die like that!” So she wouldn’t have had to feel him die like that.

Johns looked at her with eyes devoid of empathy or care. “Owens was already dead, his brain just hadn’t caught up to it yet.”

Teeth grinding, she wanted to lash out at him but realized that nothing she said or did would make a lick of difference. He wouldn’t care. She didn’t matter to him. Johns saw her, saw everyone as just tools to be used and discarded for his own agenda. No wonder he’d gone Dormant. 

“Is there anything else I should know about you? Besides the fact that you’re not suppressed, you’re dormant?”

Surging to his feet, Johns grabbed her hand and shoved it up the back of his shirt, pressing her fingers hard against a slick, ropey scar on his lower back. She tried to pull away but he was too strong. “Do you feel that? Last time I went after Riddick, he went for the sweet spot and missed. They had to leave a piece inside. I can still feel it, Carolyn, scraping against my spine. During that hunt my Sentinel gifts deserted me. As a mundane, you have no idea how that feels. The loss of my gifts is a constant ache, just like that knife tip is a constant ache, so maybe you should leave the care and feeding of my nerve endings to me.” 

Being so close to him, feeling his emotions pressing against her, filled her with revulsion. For a second she wished she was a mundane so she wouldn’t have to know how he really felt. Strange how his mind felt like the complete opposite of Riddick. 

Releasing her hand, he shoved her away. “And since the source of your new attitude is obvious, here’s some advice. Watch yourself around Riddick. I’ve caught him rubbing a lock of your blond hair across his lips, smelling it, playing with it. He’s fixating on you, has probably spent weeks planning just how he’s going to kill you. Remember that next time he’s whispering in your ear.”

Jaw clenching, she met his eyes. “I asked if there was anything else I should know about you.”

“Yeah, look to thine own ass first, right? You’d know all about that.” The memory of her confession about trying to purge the passengers hung between them. Her sense of self-righteousness faltered as bitterness surged up her throat and guilt flooded her chest.

“Captain! Captain!” Excited young voices broke their stare-off as Suleiman and Hassan burst into the room.

“I’m not your Captain,” she snarled, pivoting on her heel and stalking outside. Most of the others were there, but she couldn’t spare them any attention. Her steps stumbled to a stop on seeing the sky dominated by a huge ringed planet slowly moving to eclipse all three suns. For the first time since crashing here, the everpresent sunlight began to dim.

Imam said something at her back but she was in too much shock to listen. Why couldn’t this cursed place ever give her a break? Was God punishing her?

Shazza appeared by her side. “If we need anything from the crash ship, I suggest we kick on. That sandcat's solar.”

“We still need those power cells for the shuttle.” Carolyn pulled in a deep breath and told herself to suck it up and keep dealing. 

Seeing everyone looking at her, she raised her voice. “We’ve got to go now! Back to the ship for the cells! Get a move on!”

Hopping into the sandcat, she saw Riddick off in the shadows between two buildings, his face raised to watch the eclipse. He put the mouthpiece of the oxygen line Shazza had given him so long ago into his mouth and breathed in deeply. Canister now empty, he took the loop of tubing off his shoulder and carelessly tossed it aside in the dirt. Meeting her eyes with an enigmatic look, he turned away and left at a jog, presumably to grab something around the corner of the building.

They didn’t have time to wait for him. The sandcat roared to life and began to pull away from the settlement. As they passed the last building, Riddick jumped onto the back, followed by Johns with his box of drugs disguised as shotgun shells. With everyone on board, they roared through the canyon full of skeletons that lead back to their ship, knocking down the huge rib bones in their haste. 

The sky dimmed much quicker than she expected, than anyone expected. They hadn’t quite reached the ship when the sandcat sputtered and died, though it was only a few steps on. Shazza stayed with the sandcat to try and find a way to keep it running. With the sky getting darker, Carolyn hoped the other woman could somehow work them a miracle. Paris ran for the far section of ship where his alcohol was stashed while Carolyn and the rest jumped out to begin pulling out power cells from the torn open front of the ship. 

Standing up on the back of the sandcat, Riddick stared out into the gathering darkness towards the stone chimneys she’d almost died in. He seemed mesmerized, lips parting as he slid up his goggles and stared. 

They didn’t have time to waste stargazing. They needed to load up those power cells. 

Irritated, Carolyn followed the direction of his gaze and faltered. She felt the blood draining from her face and her knees going weak. The people next to her stopped and looked as well. Jack’s voice broke on a curse and Hassan whimpered. Thousands of those creatures who’d killed Zeke and almost killed her were bursting out of the stone chimneys and up into the sky. They kept coming and coming, a never-ending deluge. 

Their screeches echoed through the desert air as they swirled through the sky and arrowed towards the crashed ship,  _ no _ , towards Carolyn and the passengers!

“People, just a suggestion, perhaps you should flee!” Paris shouted from the door of the storage locker. 

Haunted by thoughts of being torn to pieces by the ravenous creatures overhead, Carolyn ran. Thankfully it was downhill. Johns outpaced her, shoving past Paris to get inside. Grabbing the doorframe, Carolyn pivoted to make sure everyone else made it before they closed the doors. Jack arrived next, followed closely by Imam and his boys. Unfortunately, Riddick and Shazza were still running from the sandcat when the flock of creatures reached them. 

“Get down!” she cried, heart in her throat.

They dived onto their bellies in the sand just as the creatures swooped over their heads, barely missing them. The creatures wheeled up and disappeared into the swiftly falling darkness.

Shazza’s terror and desperation hammered at Carolyn’s shields. In contrast, Riddick felt almost supernaturally calm. Carolyn thickened her mental defenses, not wanting to feel everyone’s fear on top of her own. 

After a few seconds Shazza pushed up onto her arms and looked around. It looked like the creatures were gone. 

Riddick lifted his head, did a visual sweep, and then flattened himself again. 

A bad sign. 

“Stay down,” Carolyn cried.

Shazza didn’t listen. The dark haired woman gulped in a breath and jumped to her feet. She’d lunged a single step when Riddick rolled to his side and threw a handmade bone dagger at her before flattening himself again. 

Carolyn’s mouth dropped at the unexpected betrayal.

The shiv smacked Shazza in the small of the back and bounced off instead of embedding itself. Crying out, Shazza sprawled face-first onto the sand. 

Out of the shadows boiled a flock of monsters. They swarmed through the space where Shazza had just been standing, snapping their razor-sharp teeth through the air above the two prone passengers. There were so many of the dark bodies that Carolyn couldn’t see what was happening to Shazza and Riddick. 

The air filled with blood-curdling screeches as the creatures zipped across the ground and then up and over the far side of the crashed ship. Two unmoving bodies lay on the sand. The flock’s cries became distant and disappeared. The twilight sky looked clear. 

“Shazza,” Jack gasped wetly.

Riddick moved, rising to his feet and dusting off his hands. Carolyn let out the breath she’d been holding. Striding past the downed Shazza without a glance, he reached the ship a second later and sauntered inside. 

Raising her head to spit out sand, Shazza—still alive—scrambled to her feet and ran. As soon as she reached the group they closed the doors and locked them tight. 

Gulping back sobs, Jack grabbed Shazza around the waist in a tight hug. Shazza winced and adjusted Jack’s arms higher. She probably had a bruise from the impact of the knife against her back. Thank goodness it had hit hilt-first. Had what happened been Riddick’s intention or had he meant to kill Shazza to draw the monsters away from himself? The left side of Shazza’s face was abraded and swelling from where she’d hit the ground face-first. She glared sourly at Riddick. “You couldn’t have just said duck?”

Riddick glanced at her sardonically. “I was being efficient,” he drawled. “Next time I won’t bother since we’re now even for the O2.” 

Carolyn could tell that he meant it. It was a fact in his mind, not a joke or a threat. Maybe that was how he got around his Sentinel programming, by a careful calculation of favors owed to balance the scales of personal justice. His coldness chilled her. She never wanted to become like him and Johns, not caring about or trusting other people, thinking only of herself. She’d gotten close, but she’d learned her lesson. She was better than that. She would be better than that.

Creatures thumped and rattled around the exterior of the ship. Their alien emotions pressed at her like the stench of rotting food. Swallowing, she thickened her mental shields again and blocked as much of it as she could. Thicker shields took concentration, but they served the added benefit of blocking her companions' fear and despair. She could only deal with her own emotions right now.

Without a better plan, they began searching for as many sources of light as they could find as the planet and inside of the ship turned to blackest night. Monsters began to sneak inside the ship, scratching against the walls. They retreated to a more secure section with fewer holes in the hull. 

Things were looking dire, but Carolyn refused to give up hope. She would not die here. She refused.

Everyone started pulling open boxes and crates, trying to find more light sources and anything else to increase their chances of survival. It was hard work, sifting through mostly useless gear from people who’d never come to claim it, people who’d already died in the crash. 

While the rest of them sweated like pigs from strain and terror, Riddick kept to the periphery, ignoring any orders he didn’t feel like obeying, which included most of them. Imam worked doggedly but the kids quickly tired and became distracted, curiosity and boredom overriding their fear. 

Catching the back of Hassan’s shirt as he wandered by with something shiny in his hands, Shazza yanked him in front of her and called over Suleiman and Jack too, turning the three boys into her own personal work crew. Imam merely smiled to himself and ignored their beseeching looks, letting Shazza keep them in line and stop anyone who tried to sneak off. 

It was the only spot of humor to be found. 

Riddick’s drifting along the dimly lit periphery led to him almost getting skewered by a creature who’d managed to infiltrate the room. In the scuffle he was almost shot by Johns. The second blast from Johns’s shotgun sent the creature falling at their feet, dead. 

In the light of Johns’s rifle the creature’s skin puckered and blistered, sizzling like meat on a grill and releasing a foul stench. Riddick’s nose twitched and he stepped back before stopping at seeing her eyes on him. 

“Light hurts them.” It was a weakness they could exploit, a weakness that might keep them alive. The search for light became even more urgent.

After the last crate had been searched through, they piled their loot into the center of the room and sat around it to make a plan. Johns no longer even pretended to try and work with her, putting down all of her suggestions and trying to convince everyone to ignore her and just hunker down in the ship and wait for the suns to return. Unfortunately, she and Imam were both convinced from the solar system model found in the settlement that the eclipse would be a lasting darkness. They’d run out of food and water long before the return of the sunlight. 

Frustrated with Johns, Carolyn put forth her own plan, something bold and risky, but with the best chance of survival. “I think we have enough lights. We can use them as protection while we carry the power cells to the shuttle and get the hell off this planet. The longer we wait the weaker we’ll get.” 

The infuriating argument that caused with the silently panicking Johns started with him trying to draw everyone’s focus to the poor, scared children they shouldn’t be risking (who she knew from her empathy that he couldn’t care less about) and culminated in her calling Johns a gutless coward. Temper snapping, Johns drew his gun on her, causing Riddick to simultaneously stand and pull his knife on Johns in a surprising stalemate. 

Even with her empathy, she wasn’t sure if Riddick had cared more about protecting her or screwing over Johns. Maybe it was better not to know. She didn’t need more reasons to appreciate and depend on the enigmatic Sentinel. Not now when everything was falling apart. That way lay a world of hurt. She refused to fall for Riddick.

However, she was going to have to depend on Riddick if they were going to get those power cells back to the ship. He was the only one who could see in the dark to lead them there. 

Realizing they had no other choice if they wanted to survive, the group over-ruled Johns and rigged up all of their lights, put the power cells on a sled with tethers, and began the dangerous trek through the pitch black night towards the shuttle. 

Despite her racing heart, Carolyn thought her plan was working. Then a group of monsters decided to test the boundaries of the light by swooping above them and Paris panicked, crawling away and breaking their largest source of light in the process. 

Paris died in the dark. 

The rest of them stayed together and survived. They lit Johns’ flares and the bottles of alcohol they’d converted into oil torches and marched on, grimly following in Riddick’s wake. It was a setback, but she still felt this plan could work.

Until they crossed their own tracks. 

Riddick had made them circle the canyon of bones to buy time to think. The canyon was supposedly full of creatures and the scent of Jack bleeding—revealing that Jack was actually a girl, not a boy, and just starting her menstrual cycle—was calling to the creatures like a dinner bell.

Overwhelmed, unable to think of a solution, frustrated at Jack but not wanting the girl to die, Carolyn swallowed her pride and admitted she’d been wrong, that coming out here was a mistake. They’d already lost Paris. She couldn’t let anyone die because of her plan.

Angry and vindictive, Johns chose to be contrary and argue for continuing on. Just like in the ship, the two of them fell into a heated argument, ripping into each other verbally. Carolyn refused to give him an inch. She would not back down. The others were starting to nod along with her arguments when Johns switched tactics and announced to everyone what she’d done—that during the crash she’d tried to blow the passenger cabin and kill them all to save herself. 

The horror and betrayal felt by the others hammered at her mental shields. Riddick felt no surprise, just curiosity. It was too much. Combined with her fear, anger, and guilt, it sent her launching a wild swing at Johns’s smug face. He side-stepped her attack with contemptuous ease and watched with cold satisfaction as she fell to her hands and knees. Smirking, he threw her earlier taunt in the ship back in her face. She felt so selfish, cowardly, and small, so ashamed. 

The silence bloated until Imam, hurting but also full of compassion, stepped forward and helped her to her feet. 

“The light moves on,” Johns said, lighting his last flare with a sharp motion and striding forward to join Riddick up ahead, gesturing on towards the canyon.

Angrily wiping the sweat and tears off her face, Carolyn lifted her chin and got everyone moving again. Survival meant staying with the group in the light. It meant putting one foot in front of the other to keep moving.

When the weight of their eyes and emotions became too heavy, she cleared her throat and spoke. “I’m sorry. In the heat of the moment I made a mistake. I’ve done my best since to make up for it. I’m doing my best now to get everyone out of here alive.”

Eyes flinty, Shazza gave her a choppy nod and looked away, yanking the back of Jack’s shirt to bring him—bring  _ her _ in closer to the center of the group. “I don’t like it and I’m angry, but I understand how it could happen. Keep working to keep us alive and when we get back up into the black I’ll work on forgiving you.” No one else had anything to say and the group fell again into silence.

“What are they talking about up there?” Jack asked with a quaver in her voice.

Blowing out her breath, Carolyn looked up ahead at Johns and Riddick and felt a foreboding. She thinned her shields and shuddered at the emotions coming from that direction. Johns felt clinically murderous and Riddick unwillingly protective, trying to either shove away the feeling or fit it into some sort of value proposition. Whatever was making Riddick waver couldn’t be good for the rest of them.

“Slow down,” she told everyone warily. “Just a little more space between us and them.”

Riddick’s feelings went flat and calm. He’d made his choice, but what was it? Johns felt confident and smug until something made him switch to suspicious. Between one heartbeat and the next the two men went from talking to trying to kill each other. Riddick’s knife slashed and bullets flew wildly from Johns’ gun. 

Carolyn jerked up her mental shields and made a split second decision. “Abandon the sled! Get to cover!” She herded everyone back in the opposite direction and away from the violence. She did her best to keep everyone huddled in the light of the torches and backtracking the lines in the sand.

She was so focused on not losing the trail that she almost tripped and fell when Riddick suddenly loomed up in front of them out of the darkness. “Back to the ship?” She didn’t have to ask to know that Johns was dead.

Jack wasn’t so perceptive. “Where’s Johns?”

“Which half,” Riddick asked meanly.

Flinching back, Jack blinked rapidly, her eyes beginning to swim. 

Riddick looked annoyed. “He died fast.” Looking up, he met Carolyn’s eyes. “If we have any choice about it, that's the way we should all go out.” 

She held his gaze and nodded, agreeing and thanking him for what he must’ve done. She’d felt Johns’s emotions just before the fight broke out. He’d been thinking of murder, but not of Riddick, not of his payday. By killing Johns, Riddick had protected Jack, had protected all of them. Even if no one else ever understood, she wanted him to know that she did. He’d stood Sentinel over them all.

Nostrils flaring, he looked away. Her gratitude and understanding seemed to annoy him even more than Jack’s tears. 

Stalking past Jack on his way back up to the front, he growled at the girl, “Don't you cry for Johns. Don't you dare.”

On reaching the canyon, they were forced to bunch up. Imam and Shazza bookended the two boys while she made sure Jack didn’t fall behind. Riddick took on the task of pulling all four cells by himself, the belt of lights slung diagonally across his back his only light. 

“Go faster!” Riddick cried when the thud of bodies and screech of creatures fighting made their feet slow. The creatures were everywhere, flying overhead, fighting and eating each other, crawling through the bones on every side. “Keep moving!” Even with the torches their presence attracted more and more of the creatures just outside the ring of their light. “Keep moving!”

Despite carrying all of that extra weight, Riddick slowly began pulling ahead of them. 

“Slow down!” Jack cried after him. “Riddick!”

Riddick didn’t listen. He was too focused on himself. It was a feeling she understood too well. Understood and resented. She didn’t think they could survive this passage without him.

While Carolyn was distracted staring after him, a boy screamed at her back. She spun around to see Suleiman falling with a creature on top of him. The boy screamed again and dropped his alcohol torch. The bottle broke with a burst of bright flame that made the creature jerk back. Desperately shouting and waving their torches, Imam, Shazza, and Hussan managed to drive it back and pull Suleiman away quickly enough that he only lost part of his pants and some blood instead of his entire leg.

“Wait!” Jack called after Riddick.

“We need to go faster!” Carolyn cried. If they didn’t get out of this bottleneck soon they were all going to die. 

No sooner had she thought that then Jack was pounced on by a creature hiding overhead in the spine of the great beast they’d been crawling under. A vertebrae fell, shielding Jack from the creature's frenetic head butting. Jack screamed.

Riddick’s pace stuttered and slowed. His head dropped... but he didn’t turn back.

Screaming a battle cry, angry at Riddick, herself, and this entire planet, Carolyn charged at the creature battering to get at Jack. “Get off her!” She was not losing anyone else. Not on her watch. Carolyn swiped at it with her torch, wishing she had a better weapon. The creature lashed at her with its tail, making her stumble and almost fall. Thigh stinging, Carolyn found her feet and pressed forward again. “Get off her!” She was not going to lose this child. She refused. The creature’s skin sizzled sickeningly beneath the light of her flame, but it ignored the pain, too crazed and fixated on the scent of Jack’s blood. 

Suddenly Riddick was there. Grabbing the creature, he flung it off Jack, twisted viciously, and snapped its neck. He looked up and their eyes met and caught. She felt enthralled by his power and embraced by his protection. It was a heady feeling. Riddick’s eyes sharpened on her, as if he was on the cusp of saying or doing something momentous.

“Keep going, don’t stop now!” Shazza cried, pushing past Carolyn to help Jack up and breaking the connection.

Carolyn could feel Riddick pulling back from whatever he’d been about to do. Thinning her shields, she felt him struggling against a strange warmth and unexpected pride at protecting them mixed with anger and confusion. The internal conflict was something he resented. 

She tried to sense more from him, but the fear, pain, and desperation of the others combined with the  _ HUNGER FIGHT BREED EAT HUNGER  _ of the alien creatures and became too much. She closed down her shields and returned to focusing on putting one step in front of the other and staying alive. They had to be close to the end of this canyon, didn’t they?

As they pushed their way up the nearest slope, Riddick once more pulling ahead with the power cells, a freezing rain began to fall from the sky. Within seconds, she was drenched. “Please, no,” she begged softly. Their torches sputtered and died one by one, casting their devastated faces into shadow until only Jack’s flame remained lit where the two of them huddled over it against the canyon wall. The others pressed close.

Horrible laughter burst from Riddick’s chest, dark and morbid. The sound echoed off the walls of the canyon. “Where’s your God now?” he asked Imam. She could feel him purposely not looking in her direction. The warmth, hope, and confusion that had been in his mind extinguished like their torches. A cold, hard practicality took its place. He turned his attention forward, minimizing everything at his back.

“Are we almost there? Just tell me the settlement’s right there!” Carolyn cried, needing good news, needing him to once more turn a warm, protective look her way in the face of the freezing rain.

Riddick searched ahead with his silver eyes. When his voice came it was so quiet she doubted anyone heard it but herself. “We’re not going to make it.” 

Her heartbeat stuttered.

Dropping the power cells, Riddick ran over to one of the sheer canyon walls. He crouched down and pressed his shoulder to a stone slab, heaving it to the side to reveal a small cave. “In here, now! Hide here!” 

Hunched protectively over her sputtering torch, Jack and the other two children scrambled inside, followed by Imam and Shazza. Carolyn went in last. She turned to demand that Riddick explain his plan, only to see the slab being heaved back into place, trapping them inside the tight space without him.

“Why’s he still out there?” Shazza asked roughly, tired and bewildered.

Carolyn felt frozen. 

“Come,” Imam said softly, “let us combine the alcohol into the one torch to keep the light burning as long as possible.”

Firming her lips, Carolyn nodded and moved forward to help. Maybe Riddick would get more light from the shuttle and come back for them. Come back for her. As the minutes passed and the torch burned lower and lower, her hope died. 

“He’s not comin’ back… is he?” Jack asked as the flame dimmed, only saying what Carolyn had long since figured out herself.

The cave went black. Too exhausted for even tears, Carolyn thought she was imagining it at first when a blue light slowly illuminated the faces of her companions. 

Then Suleiman jumped to his knees and pointed. “Look!” 

“Oh!” Jack exclaimed.

The cave walls were covered with glowing blue alien worms. 

Scraping the label off a rectangular glass bottle, they filled it with every glowing bug they could find. However, there were only enough bugs for one bottle. They couldn’t get six people through the rest of the canyon and over to the shuttle with just one glowing bottle.

“I’ll go,” Shazza said. “I’ll go and—and force Riddick to come back with me.” Her face twisted and she met Carolyn’s eyes with barely hidden despair.

Jack looked up in hope, but Carolyn knew just like Shazza did that no one could get Riddick to do anything he didn’t want to do. Shazza didn’t believe in her own words. She didn’t believe she’d survive the trip or that Riddick would come back. She was just trying to give the kids some hope.

Nevertheless—“No, I’ll do it. I’m the captain.” And she’d rather die quick out there alone and on her feet than slowly huddled in here with the people she’d failed. 

Barely hiding her relief, Shazza nodded.

“Of us all, he likes you best,” Imam said, passing over the glowing bottle.

At least Carolyn wasn’t the only one in the cave to react to that statement with incredulity. Imam just gave a thin smile and patted her on the leg.

Running through the canyon and down the abandoned streets of the settlement with only a glowing blue bottle was a new level of nightmare. Using her fear as a goad, she clenched her teeth against the discomfort and used her empathy to avoid the largest congregations of creatures. Slowly she fought her way through until she caught sight of the distant lights of the shuttle powering up.

Carolyn splashed forward through the streets, not pausing until she stood panting in front of the brightly lit shuttle. Already strapped in, Riddick stared at her in shock through the windshield. The hatch in the back was closed. He really had written them all off for dead. He’d been going to leave her, leave them all here to protect himself. 

And she couldn’t even sustain her anger at the thought because she was exhausted and a part of her completely understood the feeling. Now that she’d reached the safety of the brightly lit shuttle, she didn’t know if she could face going out into the dark again. But she had to. She’d promised. Riddick had to see reason and help her. He had to help her get the others to safety. He had to.

Lowering the ramp, Riddick walked out to stare out at her in the mud and rain. She moved beneath the shelter of one of the wings but didn’t walk closer. The space between them felt too thick. Riddick gave her a complicated look, his goggles hiding the silver sheen of his eyes. His lips curled. “Strong survival instinct. I admire that in a woman.”

Carolyn was barely hanging on by a thread. “I promised to go back for them with more light.” She stared up at him.

Riddick hummed and tilted his head to the side. “That’s nice.” Otherwise he didn’t react.

Acid surged up her throat. He wasn’t going to make this easy. Jerking up her chin, she attacked. “What, are you afraid?” 

He laughed, the sound of scorn failing to hide his discomfort from an empath. “Of what?” 

Instead of what she’d meant to say, something about alien monsters and teeth the size of flight control sticks, she found her instincts taking over her tongue. “Of caring, of being part of a Tribe again and letting yourself be the Sentinel you were always meant to be.” 

All humor dropped from Riddick’s face. “I don’t have a Tribe.” 

Beneath her steady stare his lips quirked and he leaned an arm against the side of the shuttle. “To be honest, even if I did want a tribe, I wouldn’t know how to start.” 

“With helping me now. Help me save them.” 

For a moment he stared at her thoughtfully. Hope sputtered in his heart for a second and then died, replaced by weary cynicism. He gave a slow shake of his head and angled his face away. “It won’t work.” 

“Then give me light and I’ll go back for them,” she demanded wildly, hoping to break through to him somehow.

“Okay.” Lifting his light belt off a hook, he tossed it at her feet. At least four of the six bulbs were cracked and blackened. It was useless. She wondered if it had gotten broken on accident or if he’d done it on purpose to keep himself from being tempted to come back. 

“Please, just come with me,” she begged. She couldn’t do this on her own. She needed him.

“How about this.” He took a step down the ramp. “Come with me instead. Those people aren’t your Tribe. Come inside and we’ll get off this planet and explore our chemistry in comfort, privacy, and safety.” A sensually cruel smile curved his lips, tempting her, tempting her fiercely. 

Carolyn hugged arms around herself. Swallowed. “You’re messing with me. I know you are.” She wanted to go up into the safety of the shuttle so badly, but—“I can’t.”

Stopping, Riddick’s expression went cold. “You don’t know me. I will leave you here. Come with me. Now.”

“I—I can’t.” Carolyn sank to her knees. “I can’t.” Panting, mouth working soundlessly, she fell forward, her fingers sinking into the cold, gritty mud. Her head felt too heavy to keep up.

“No one would blame you for saving yourself. Here, I’ll help.” Riddick held out a hand to her, offering her safety, offering her an escape. 

She looked at it helplessly, paralyzed by the war taking place in her conscience.

Riddick moved to her side with a sigh and put his hands on her waist, pushing and lifting her up. 

Gasping, crying, Carolyn slowly started crawling up the ramp on her knees. Riddick let her go, let her take those final steps to damnation without his interference. Shakily she pushed herself to her feet. She took a step, the weight of her shame almost too heavy to bear. Safety was so close. It’s right there in that brightly lit cabin. She just needed to move forward to be done with this nightmare. She took another step.

She’d live. 

But she and Riddick would be the only ones who’d live. 

Her body’s momentum wavered, picturing Jack, Shazza, Imam, Suleiman, and Hassan waiting for her back in that dark cave, picturing their faces and that of the other passengers in their cryobeds when she’d pulled the lever to try and save herself by purging them during the crash. The visceral feel of that lever jerking in her hand was something she’d never forget. Nor would she ever forget the guilt.

Carolyn couldn’t pull that lever again. She won't. He won’t tempt her. It was wrong then and it’s wrong now. They’re Guide and Sentinel, meant to protect others with their gifts. She’s better than that. He’s better than that. It was time for her conscience to guide them both, even if that meant forcefully drafting him as a Sentinel.

Feeling like an ember dropped into a crate of rocket fuel, she turned and jumped at Riddick with a cry of righteous rage, knocking him flat on his back in stunned surprise. “Now you! You listen to me, Sentinel Richard B. Riddick!” she shouted in his face. “I am your Captain and Guide! And I say we are not leaving anyone on this rock to die, even if that means—”

Riddick flipped them over in the slippery mud and slid her body beneath his, pressing his knife to her neck with a snarl.

It should scare her, but it didn’t. She was too worked up to be scared of him anymore. This was too important and at some point she’d apparently decided that he didn’t want to hurt her. That trust might get her killed, but she’s too exhausted to fight with both herself and him at the same time. “Get that off my neck!”

“Shut up!” he barked, features twisting with a maelstrom of emotions. 

Biting her tongue, she glared at him mutinously, blinking rain out of her eyes so he couldn’t fail to miss the full force of her displeasure.

“You’d die for them?” he demanded unexpectedly.

She still didn’t want to die, but—“I’d try for them.” Living with herself meant being able to live with her actions. She couldn’t carelessly throw away the lives of these people again, not without trying her very best to save them first. 

Disappointment stained Riddick’s face and emotions. “That’s not what I asked.” He stared into her face, searching for something, maybe for the answers he needed to rejoin the rest of humanity. “No lies.”

How frustrating must it be for a Sentinel who could detect lies to always be lied to? To be constantly used and betrayed as he must’ve been? Would it teach you to stop caring for others? To stop seeking for a Tribe because no one you met would protect you the way your instincts urged you to protect them? 

And did he see a light of redemption for himself in her journey? A Guide who’d gone from being willing to kill a shipful of strangers to keep herself alive to being willing to risk her life to save just a handful of those same passengers? Carolyn didn’t know how to show him how to care for others when she herself was so flawed, but damned if she didn’t want to try. Saving the passengers meant saving him too, even from himself. Maybe she could guide both of them there.

“Yes, I would.” She sucked in a breath and felt peace and resolution fill her soul. “I would die for them. I would have them as my Tribe. I would use my Gifts to protect them.”

Riddick pulled off his goggles and examined her intently with his silver eyes, a look that penetrated to her very soul. She met his gaze unflinchingly, letting him see what he would. 

Finally he gave a faint nod and leaned back. His lips parted and curled faintly. “How interesting.” Eyes still locked on hers, he stood up and held out his hand. 

This time, she took it. 


	5. Chapter 5

Carolyn and Riddick managed to make her way back to the others without dying horribly. Feeling their emotions soar at her return, she imprinted on each of them as they stepped out of the cave, cementing their status in her mind as Tribe and bringing herself a measure of peace. If she lost someone on the way back to the shuttle it would hurt, but considering that she’d told Riddick she was willing to die for them, it seemed stupid to hold back on formalizing that connection in her mind. 

Once they started running through the dark canyon holding onto each other single file, her hand secured in Riddick’s, she had to fight the instincts clamoring that he should be hers too. No matter how infuriating he could be, she still wanted a tie to him. She wanted to understand him and know what he was feeling. However, when she tried reaching out for his mind she ran into a silver shield. She might’ve been able to get around it, but only if she used force. Carolyn backed down. 

Through rain and darkness they fought their way back to settlement. With monsters circling above and on every side it became a mad dash of terror and exertion. At last they made it to the blazing shuttle. “On board now! C’mon! Up the ramp!” Carolyn counted heads as they scrambled into the light and collapsed in exhaustion. Shazza, Jack, Imam, Suleiman, and Hassan had all made it. Against impossible odds she’d protected her new tribe and led them to safety. She’d done it. 

Except someone was still missing. A very important someone. 

Riddick.

Watching with mounting dread, she searched the pitch black night from the safety of the shuttle ramp. No footsteps splashed in the distance. No silver gleamed in the dark. Last she’d seen of Riddick, he’d turned to distract the monster on their tail while everyone else ran. For countless minutes she stared out at the rain and mud, straining her eyes, ears, and empathy for signs of the Sentinel. Nothing reached her but the creatures' ravenous and all-consuming  _ HUNGER _ .

“He’s not coming,” Shazza said curtly from the shuttle ramp. “We need to lift off and save those who are left.” She stood with her arm around Jack’s shoulders. Dropping her head to Shazza’s chest, Jack started to cry.

Riddick wasn’t part of their tribe. He didn’t want to be her or any other Guide’s Sentinel. He didn’t want or need Carolyn’s protection. And yet…. 

If there was even a chance he still lived out in that hellish night, she couldn’t leave him. Would not leave him. They hadn’t bonded, but their souls had kissed just as surely as their lips. Her universe would be a much darker place without him alive and thriving in it. She couldn’t believe he was dead. Wouldn’t she know if he was? Wouldn’t she sense his spiritual sheen on the astral plane go dull and grey? 

Her fingers started to cramp around the glowing blue bottle of bugs still clutched in one hand. The rear shuttle light strobed, reflecting off the rain and carving paths of light in the darkness that failed to reveal the man she was looking for. She was the one who’d promised to risk her life for everyone, not Riddick. It wasn’t fair.

“Come,” Imam said softly. She could feel his regret over Riddick’s loss, the painful ache of Ali dying too soon, and his urgency to leave this cursed place and find a way to release his pain to his God. 

“I can’t. Not yet. I’m a Guide and Riddick… he was a Sentinel,” Carolyn confessed, blinking back tears in the rain. “I think he was my—my compatible Sentinel.”

“Bloody hell,” Shazza breathed, shaking her head slowly. “What a thing.”

Imam stepped to the edge of the ramp and met her eyes solemnly. “Then we shall honor both his sacrifice as our Protector and your loss once we are safely gone. Come, Carolyn. We must leave.”

Breathing ragged, heart hurting, she felt the pull of Tribe. They needed her. She started to turn her back on the cold dark night when something on the astral plane clawed for her attention. Carolyn jerked back around and took two halting steps away from the shuttle, straining her senses. From the settlement echoed a faint cry of anger and pain, one she would’ve missed if she’d gone inside.

Not thinking, Carolyn bolted back out into the wet night. Holding the glowing blue bottle aloft, she frantically searched the shadows. “Riddick? Riddick?!” Skidding around a corner, she searched the stacked boxes for signs of her Sentinel. “Riddick!”

Something fell out of the darkness, knocking over boxes with a clatter. She swung her shining bottle around, fearing teeth and claws. Instead, she found Riddick. 

He grimly hung onto the side of a crate and looked at her blankly. She could tell that his Sentinel senses were giving him trouble, overwhelmed at last with sensory dials on the wrong settings. Bloody slices covered him, including a deep slice across his thigh that kept him from standing upright. The cut on his scalp painted his ear red while creature blood covered his knife arm in pale blue. 

Despite all that he was one of the most beautiful sights she’d ever seen. Carolyn reached out for him both physically and mentally, pulling him close. After only a token resistance he collapsed against her body, though his mind stayed stubbornly shielded. 

“Okay, you’re okay,” she told him, trying to lift his dead weight up off the ground. “We’re gonna get out of here. Hold onto me.” Riddick tried to push up with his leg and slipped, knocking them both down into the cold, slippery mud. A strangled groan escaped his clenched teeth. She could feel his agony and utter exhaustion, but she couldn’t indulge it. They had to get out of here. “Okay, I’ve got you. Get up. Up!” 

When he didn’t respond, she reached out for him with her empathy. “Let me in.” His silver shields tried to keep her out. She shook him and growled in his ear, “Richard!” Blinking, feeling startled by the use of his first name, his shields parted just enough to let her slip inside. 

Not letting herself think of consequences or the scintillating beauty and danger of his mind, she scooped up half of his pain like she’d done for a dying Owens and swallowed it down. It was amazing that he was still conscious with that much pain radiating through him, though she got the strangest sense that it had been even worse and he’d healed some of it just a few minutes before she’d arrived, which seemed impossible, though Riddick had been kicked in the face by Shazza, gone unconscious, and barely had a bruise to show for it on hour later. Mentally slapping herself for getting distracted, she focused on settling his pain inside her mind without letting it overwhelm her. 

Their mental connection shook under the strain. It helped that he was a Sentinel with a native connection to the astral plane, but without even a tribal bond between them the strain proved to be too much for her to stay with him without help from his side of the link. As she fell out of his mind clutching half his pain to herself stubbornly, her last thought was to snap a mental kick upside his spirit, aligning his Sentinel senses back into place.

“Now get up!” Carolyn wheezed, fighting to keep her feet beneath the pain now shooting through her nerves and the large man hanging off her shoulder. Her gifts felt strained, but not burned out. Not like when she’d had to witness Owens’ death. She hurt, but pain was nothing new. It settled inside her easier than she expected. Maybe because Owens wasn’t a Sentinel or maybe because Riddick’s soul was compatible enough to bond with hers. She yanked on Riddick’s body and found the strength to yell. “If I can carry half, so can you. Focus and get up! Up!”

Abruptly surging to his feet, Riddick gasped painfully and swayed, clutching at her body and fighting to stay upright and not pass out. He buried his face in her shoulder and breathed hard, the scalding breaths puffing down her chest. His skin radiated heat like a furnace in the dark chill of the rain. He lifted his head from her neck, blinked, and focused on her face, as if finally realizing that she was really here and not a hallucination. She felt a tingle as all of his enhanced senses catalogued her body.

“Let's move. Come on.” She strained to keep his slippery body upright as she pulled him towards the shuttle, frustrated at their lack of progress. “I said I'd die for them, not you.” 

Lips parting, Riddick stared at her as if having a revelation. 

Carolyn didn’t have time for revelations as she doggedly dragged him another step. She could feel the handle of his shiv pressing uncomfortably against her spine where he clutched at her waist. Maybe she should be worried about how close that knife was to her sweet spot, but she just… wasn’t. 

“That’s...” Riddick stumbled and swallowed hard, “a lie.” 

When she tried to glare at him to keep moving he caught her gaze, not letting her look away as he searched her face and inadvertently revealed his heart. Empathic shields still thin and control wobbly, Carolyn found herself pulled deep into the core of his soul. Beyond the scars and pain she found brutal strength mixed with honor. She found a yearning for something more, for purpose and connection. 

Carolyn couldn’t help the compulsion that made her drop her mental shields and reach for him anymore than she could resist the compulsion to risk her life coming back to save him. She wasn’t sure who was more shocked when her mind sank deep into his mental embrace like a ship coming into dock. Before she could react, his Sentinel gifts snapped up and curved around her mind in a silver dome. It started out aggressive but it didn’t stay that way. The panes of the silver dome shivered and flipped so they faced out instead of in, protecting her mind from external threats in an impressive display of mental strength. Carolyn gasped as the background empathic noise she always had to work to filter out dropped away.

Riddick pulled her indecently close on the astral plane. She could see his soul so clearly. She saw him in ways she’d never seen another person before, all his shades of black, white, and gray. She wasn’t sure he even realized that he was initiating a soul bond. It left some wiggle room. In that moment she knew she could resist. That everyone would expect her to resist and break free. 

Caroly didn’t want to.

Because at that moment, she was amazed to realize that she loved Richard B. Riddick. She’d seen his soul and found it mesmerizing. There were still many things she didn't know about him, but she wanted to learn. There were things she didn’t like, but she knew she could accept. Just like he’d have to accept her flaws and imperfections. Everything she’d seen of him when push came to shove and everything she’d glimpsed when their minds and spirits had woven together had made her want more. At some point when she wasn’t looking she’d fallen and fallen hard. She loved him completely, flaws and all. She loved him enough to die for him, loved him enough to live with him and fight to stay together. With Riddick, she wanted to do more than to just try. She wanted to bond with him soul to soul and spend the rest of her life exploring their connection. She loved him.

With their eyes locked, she didn’t try to hide her feelings from him. She let them fill her face and wash through their mental connection. 

Riddick seemed stunned. Overcome. The slight widening of his eyes comes a second before the silver embrace of his mental presence freezes and starts to pull back. He’d seized control of his instincts and realized what he’d done in pulling her so intimately close on the astral plane. He didn’t trust it, maybe still didn’t want it.

That didn’t change how she felt. He didn’t have to bond with her or love her back, but she’d shove her feelings down his throat before letting him pretend that she’s lying or think he didn’t deserve to be loved. She needed him to know that at least one person in the universe saw the truth of him and still loved him, loved him not despite but because of it.

She felt Riddick struggling, scared and trying to reject her caring as a lie but failing with the proof staring him in the face. Eyes narrowing as rain splattered their faces, he pressed roughly against her mind and scanned her with his senses, searching for deception. She didn’t let herself hide anything from him, not her pain, not her flaws, and not the truth of her love. Riddick’s chest heaved, struggling for air as he started to believe. 

It’s such a profound moment of connection that she barely notices the talons clenching down on her arms until she’s ripped sharply from his arms and dragged up into the sky. 

The physical pain slicing through her body felt almost secondary to the emotional pain as her mental tie to Riddick tore free, leaving her reeling as the unfinished bond withered away. She caught a glimpse of Riddick splashing forward onto the ground, his face illuminated in pale blue, before she lost sight of him in the dark rain. She’s mentally scrambling. Everything hurts. 

Terrified and blind, Carolyn dangled from the creature's talons high in the sky. She’s about to be killed by a creature of nightmare and her empathy has blown wide open. Rubbing against the creature’s emotions felt like reaching into a vat of rotting flesh. Doing so while being eaten would be even worse. 

Cutting off the whimpers she hadn’t realized she was making, Carolyn forced herself to purposely probe the creature’s mind and try to forge a mental link. Her first two attempts failed but she forced herself to keep trying. Sobbing, desperate, she finally connected enough to read specific feelings.

_ HUNGER. EXCITEMENT. EAT. NOW. _ The creature’s mouth dipped to take a bite of her leg. Carolyn tucked her head tight against the leathery limb clenched around her shoulder and upper arm and swung her legs back so it couldn’t reach. Frustrated, the creature shook her, dislocating at least one shoulder and digging its claws in even deeper.

Carolyn screamed and fought to stay conscious. She had to focus or she was dead. Sobbing and desperate, she blasted feelings of  _ FRIEND  _ and  _ PROTECT  _ at the animal holding her captive. 

Body stuttering, the creature swooped lower, putting agonizing strain on her shoulders and pierced flesh.  _ FOOD _ it decided after a few moments of incomprehension. Carolyn despairingly remembered that these things were cannibals and unlikely to form personal bonds. 

_ NOT SAFE _ she pushed next, barely hanging on to consciousness. If she passed out, she’d never wake up again. 

_ DOWN. ALONE. SAFE. EAT.  _ She could see the lights of the shuttle in the distance, a cruel tease. The monster angled down to a dark space between two buildings.  _ HUNGRY.  _ No other creatures seemed to be around.

Seemed.

Just before they landed, she felt  _ HUNGER  _ rapidly approaching from above. Crying out, fighting to survive, she tucked up her arms and legs. Claws scraped across her calf. The creature holding her screamed and jolted as  _ PAIN  _ filled its thoughts, followed by feelings of  _ MINE  _ and  _ FIGHT _ . Both creatures made high-pitched shrieks and hoots. They crashed together, spattering her with hot blood and  _ VIOLENCE _ .

The claws holding her abruptly pulled out of her flesh. Screaming, Carolyn dropped through the air. Her scream abruptly cut off as she landed on a rooftop, rolling and sliding. The roof panel snapped beneath the weight of her body and dumped her inside the building. The beams of the ceiling collapsed together to form a precarious new roof while bits of debris pelted her body.

Unable to breathe after landing so hard and in excruciating pain, she lay paralyzed for several moments. Finally she found enough energy to suck in a breath of air. Eyes blind with tears, she forced herself to roll over... or at least she tried. Her arms wouldn’t work and rolling onto her open wounds caused her body to seize with pain. She convulsed. Fighting to stay conscious, she flopped onto her back and focused on breathing and not throwing up. If she threw up and passed out she’d asphyxiate on her own vomit.

Expecting teeth to tear her apart at any moment, Carolyn looked around and realized that she could see. The room was illuminated enough to make out a bed shoved against the wall and a small dresser strewn with deteriorating personal effects. Light strobed in from a high window in the opposite wall so the shuttle lights must be in line with that side of the building. 

If she could just get to the shuttle she’d be safe, but the light was dim enough that this must be one of the far buildings. Her excitement extinguished as quickly as a torch in the rain. Carolyn couldn’t even use her arms, much less find the strength to stand up. She was bleeding and had no source of light. The shuttle could be just outside the door and it would still be an impossible distance. 

Unable to just give up when she’d fought so hard for so long to live, Carolyn took a hitching breath and feebly pushed against the dirty floor with her feet, slowly pushing her body backwards until her head hit the wall. Somehow she pushed herself up onto her knees. Spots danced in front of her eyes but she ignored them, forcing her body to shuffle along the gritty wall until she could wedge herself into the corner with the most light. 

Panting through clenched teeth, she wondered if the faint light was bright enough to protect her from being eaten. Carolyn’s mind drifted. Warm blood trickled down her icy-cold skin and slowly pooled in the crooks of her elbows. The scent would soon draw something hungry enough to risk a little burn. Of course, Riddick would be reaching the shuttle any second now and taking the lights away with him. Death at that point was guaranteed.

With surprise, she realized that she didn’t regret giving her life to save the passengers. They were her Tribe to protect. And she didn’t regret going back a second time to save Riddick. She didn’t want to die but she couldn’t regret saving the man who might’ve been her Sentinel. 

No, what she regretted was not taking him up on that offer in the shuttle to let him glut his senses on her body until they both passed out from pleasure. 

She also regretted giving these creatures the satisfaction of eating her. Maybe she’d get lucky and the backwash from the shuttle engines would set the settlement on fire and immolate her body, depriving them of the pleasure. One could only hope. At the very least she hoped she bled to death before they got to her with teeth and claws.

Something outside the building scraped softly. 

Carolyn’s stomach dropped. Of course she wasn’t that lucky. Her time was up. She didn’t bother trying to project to the mind of the creature outside, didn’t have the energy to even try. She was spent. Unfortunately she was also too drained to erect mental shields to protect her from feeling the creature’s emotions. 

As the door slammed open she was hit with a wash of feral  _ RAGE _ . Knocked mentally sideways, she blacked out.

When Carolyn forced her heavy eyelids to open again, she saw a blurry blue monster crouching in front of her. She tried to raise her arms defensively, but before she could do more than tense and twitch, the sharp pain made her whimper and abort the motion. Dark spots swam in front of her eyes, threatening to drop her back into the abyss of unconsciousness.

The monster gave a bass growl. Glass clattered onto the floor. Calloused hands reached out and pressed her wrists to her thighs, keeping her wounded arms still. The press of skin on skin brought a feeling like an electrical jolt, bringing her clarity and clearing her eyes. 

It wasn’t a blue monster, at least not an animal one. “Richard?” It was a human monster with a glowing blue bottle of bugs. It was her monster. Carolyn relaxed. The bottle of bugs dimmed as it rolled into the yellow light of the shuttle through the window. 

Blinking, she realized that Riddick being here meant he had come after her instead of getting himself safe to the shuttle. “Why?” Her throat felt raw and swollen from screaming. She swallowed and frowned at him.

Instead of answering, Riddick lowered his head and breathed hotly against the delicate tracery of veins in her wrist, running his nose up her forearm and leaving warmth behind on her icy skin. A strange energy flowed from him and soaked into her body. She’d never felt anything like it before. The Sentinel seemed to be running on primitive instincts more than logic right now. He must’ve gone feral at seeing her taken. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. If he’d died while tracking her down, her sacrifice would’ve been for nothing.

Pausing at the crook of her elbow, he lapped at the blood that had pooled there, dragging his tongue up the red lines on her arms until only clean skin remained. It felt strangely nice. Caring. Arousing almost if she hadn’t been on the verge of death. 

But then his tongue moved up to lick the wounds on her upper arms and shoulders clean. 

“Stop!” she choked out, trying and failing to get away from him. The licking made her wounds burn, like his mouth was filled with something more than just normal saliva. 

Riddick growled and pulled her closer. 

Her breath sobbed in and out of her chest as he licked at her torn flesh until he was satisfied that it had been cleaned enough. She could feel that he wasn’t doing it to be cruel, he was trying to take care of her. It still hurt. She only had a moment of relief before he moved to her other arm and began licking blood off with the same thoroughness. 

Just when she thought he might finally be done, he grabbed her arm, lifted, rotated, and yanked. Her shoulder snapped back into place with a sick crunch. She gasped wetly and passed out. 

When she woke, Riddick was licking the fresh blood seeping down her arm. Carolyn wept and endured. Crooning softly, he licked a shallow scrape on her chin and finally sat back on his heels. 

Grabbing the hem of his shirt, Riddick lifted it off over his head and ripped it into two pieces. If she wasn’t in so much pain she’d take more pleasure in the sight of his bare torso rippling beneath miles of deliciously unblemished dark skin. As it was she took a mental snapshot and promised to revisit it at a later date if she survived all of this. Maybe during a long, hot shower she thought with a weak spurt of amusement. Riddick looked at her through his eyelashes and gave her a faint smirk before he began to use his shirt to bind the wounds on her arms. She hissed through her teeth in pain. The discomfort made the sight of his bare torso fade in importance, though she vaguely thought that it odd that the cuts on his back and arms seemed to have disappeared and the gouge above his ear had already become a small scab.

Once done binding her arms, Riddick cocked his head and licked blood from the corner of his mouth as he looked her over for more wounds. It gave her a chance to catch her breath. Completing his survey, he moved down to her legs. The slice on her calf and a gouge on her thigh received the same treatment, but thankfully the wounds weren’t as bad so it went more quickly.

Blinking tears out of her eyes, she took a shuddering breath and realized that she could move her arms now, though it still hurt. Not as much as it should have, though. He’d also somehow stolen back the pain she’d drained from him earlier and made it disappear from the back of her mind. She felt strangely light without it. The people he came from must have insanely advanced healing and spiritual gifts. 

Riddick sat back and ran a hand over his shaved head, ripping open the scab above his ear. She winced when it started bleeding anew, though he seemed unfazed. Swiping two fingers across the open wound, he coated them in blood. 

Then he reached for her mouth.

Instantly Carolyn clamped her mouth shut and turned her head to the side. 

Grabbing her chin, he forced her head back and rested his wet fingertips on her bottom lip. He didn’t shove them in but he clearly expected obedience as he caught her eyes in a steely and intelligent gaze, obviously no longer feral. “Open, Caro.” 

She felt the press of his mind as he opened his silver shields and swept them around her like wings.  _ What was he doing? _

Realizing he had more patience than she did and fearing what he’d do next to get his way, not to mention her own exhaustion, she sighed through her nose, giving in as she grudgingly opened her lips. The taste of copper burst across her tongue as he slid his fingers in and out of her mouth. She swallowed involuntarily and wondered what he’d do if she asked for some peppermint schnapps to cut the taste. The thought made her lips twitch. 

Lips curving in satisfaction, Riddick dropped a searing kiss on her mouth and leaned back just enough to whisper against her mouth, “Blood shared, spirits bound, fates fused. My body stands Sentinel, your empathy Guides.” Leaning back, he looked at her steadily, expectantly.

Swallowing hard, mouth still flooded with copper, she fought not to faint again. “What?”

Eyes going hard, he gruffly ordered, “Say it. Bond with me, Carolyn Fry. Say the ritual words and make the link.”

“You don’t owe me this. You don’t owe me anything.” She searched his face but didn’t know what his expression meant. A laugh tried to escape her lips but turned into a cough. It hurt. Everything hurt. When she caught her breath again, she gave him a humorless smile. “Besides, I could die at any moment and bonding would drag your spirit down with me.”

“You’re not allowed to die,” he snapped, a muscle jumping in his cheek. 

Ignoring her incredulous look, he cupped her face and smoothed along her jaw with his thumbs. “Look,” lips firming, eyes shining silver, he glared at her. “We’re in this together now. I want a bond. I want a bond with you. Say the words, Caro.” Behind the bossy tone she could feel his emotions, a swirling mass of desperate hope, desire, and need all focused on her, powerful and protective. When she didn’t answer right away, overcome at the quiet and shy feeling of love hiding behind his louder emotions, his voice and confidence wavered, “Please.”

Nodding slowly, she breathed in and took him into her soul. “Blood shared, spirits bound, fates fused. My empathy Guides, your body stands Sentinel. Bonded as one from this moment on.” Leaning forward, she pressed her mouth to his in a soft kiss that echoed the easy merging of their spirits. His silver shields embraced her mind fully, locking out any unwanted mental contact and granting her peace and safety. Her mind had just enough strength to sweep through and complete the bonding, making herself the touchstone to his senses for the rest of their days. They soared together on the astral plane.

Overworked, her gifts dropped her back into her aching body. “Ow,” she groaned even as she met his eyes and smiled. Her eyes welled with good tears at the relief and joy of being bonded to her Sentinel. It felt amazing and his wonder and exultation at the bonding made her want to preen. “I know we could still die at any moment, but wow.”

Carefully hugging her close, he pressed a kiss to her temple and breathed in the scent of her hair. “Definitely wow and you’re still not allowed to die. Come on, up. Back to the shuttle.” Keeping an arm around her waist, he pulled her to her feet. 

“This feels familiar,” she said wryly, leaning heavily against him. She was surprised to find her legs actually bearing her weight. “Except notice how quickly I got up when you asked.”

“Carolyn.”

“Richard.” She smirked at him, unable to help herself.

Riddick rolled his eyes. “Let’s go. Anything tries to take a bite of us, I’ll kill it.” Reaching down, he picked up the bottle of bugs and tucked it into her hand, making sure she had a firm grip before letting go. 

Her body still felt painful and distressingly weak, even with whatever Riddick had done to jumpstart her healing, but at least she no longer felt on the verge of death. She wrapped her arm around his trim waist and tucked her fingers into his waistband to keep her balance. “Try to keep us in the light of the shuttle on the way.” 

He grunted. “As long as it doesn’t fly off without us.” Riddick moved them to the door and opened it a crack, scanning for creatures with all his senses. She could distantly feel him using her as an anchor to cast his senses out farther than he usually allowed himself to go.

“They can’t. No one else knows how to fly.” 

Pausing, Riddick pulled his senses back in and looked down at her incredulously. 

“There’s just you and me.” She shrugged. 

Riddick threw back his head with a loud bark of laughter. Lips still twitching, he raised his shiv in his free hand and used it to lead the way out the door and around the dark front of the building until they were illuminated by the lights of the distant shuttle. 

Carolyn didn’t have the strength to hold the bottle up but she kept it at their backs where their bodies would naturally cast shadows that the creatures might use to sneak up in. She could hear them slithering and rustling in the shadows, but as each step bathed them in more light the sounds diminished.

They’d made it almost all the way to the shuttle when someone shouted. The stranded passengers poured out onto the ramp and started cheering. “They’re alive!” Jack shouted.

“There’s my God!” Imam fell to his knees in the mud, raising his hands to the heavens.

She probably shouldn’t have left the five of them behind to go after just one man when none of them knew how to fly, but she had no regrets, not when the man she’d saved was Richard B. Riddick, her now bonded Sentinel. Even if she had died, he still would’ve lived and could’ve flown them to safety. It had been worth the risk. He’d been worth it. 

She felt a throb of embarrassment and pleasure as Riddick caught the edge of what she was feeling through their mental link.

As the two of them reached the shuttle, they were mobbed by the ecstatic passengers, who must’ve been on the cusp of giving them both up for dead (and consequently themselves). 

“Fry, you’re the luckiest woman I’ve ever met to cheat death this many times!” Shazza laughed and squeezed her forearm, grinning.

Imam grabbed Riddick’s wrist and shook it enthusiastically, not bothered by the bloodstained knife still held in his hand. “Praise be to Allah for your survival!”

“Captain! Captain!” Suleiman and Hassan jumped up and down on the ramp and waved their arms. 

Carolyn sketched them a shaky salute and handed the bottle to a beaming Jack. “Break that for me and set the bugs free, will ya? They deserve it.” Jack nodded eagerly and threw the bottle at the side of a nearby crate, shattering it and freeing the bugs a bit more violently than Carolyn had intended. Hopefully some of them survived.

Carolyn stepped away from Riddick and put a foot up onto the ramp, more than ready to fire up the engines and kiss this planet goodbye. However, the second her fingers slipped free of her Sentinel’s skin she abruptly became dizzy and found her strength disappearing. Her knees buckled. 

Before she could hit the ramp, Riddick swept her up into his arms. “Sorry, I’m fine,” she told him groggily, patting his chest as he carried her up into the ship. A muscle in his jaw was jumping and his eyes were flint, trying to hide his worry behind anger. 

Sitting down in the pilot seat, Riddick arranged her body so she was sideways in his lap with her cheek pressed against his bare shoulder. She thought about protesting but he was just so comfortable and she was so tired. Her body had given everything it had to give. She turned her nose into his neck and sighed. His hand rubbed down her thigh.

The sound of the conversation in the back turned awkward as everyone settled into their seats and stared at the two of them basically snuggling.

“Fry can have my seat,” Jack offered, sounding both jealous and confused. “I can sit on the floor.”

“She’s fine where she is.” The sound of Riddick’s voice rumbled from his chest directly into her ears. She liked the sensation. 

“Jack,” Shazza whispered loudly, “they bonded.”

“Oh! Wow, really? Does that mean he knew she was a Guide this whole time even though none of us did?”

Mouth curving, Carolyn opened heavy eyelids to see Riddick flipping switches to close the ramp and prep for takeoff. “Don’t forget to—” she pointed weakly.

“I got it.”

“Ships this old are finicky. You need to—”

“I got it. Relax.” He pushed her head firmly back down on his shoulder before reaching out to flip the switch she’d been about to mention. 

Huffing, she let him take charge. For now. She nipped him with her teeth to show that he couldn’t just boss her around all of the time, Sentinel or no. 

His head dipped next to her ear and breathed, “Don’t start. Not unless you’re willing to finish in front of this crowd.”

Before she could decide what to do about the tingles now running up and down her spine, he reached out and shut off the lights, plunging the outside of the ship into darkness.

“Riddick? What are you doing?” Jack asked with a quaver as creatures landed on the windshield of the craft and started banging their heads against it, trying to get inside.

“We can’t leave…” he told her, “...without saying goodnight.” Giving a cruel smirk, he fired up the engines and took off, releasing an explosion of propellant that lit the settlement on fire and incinerated thousands of swarming creatures. Satisfaction oozed from him. Carolyn felt pretty great about it herself.

As they rose above the cloud layer and the windshield filled with the familiar glory of the stars, everyone heaved a sigh of relief. Imam and his two remaining boys broke into prayers of praise, though everyone had to be feeling the ghosts of those they’d left behind. It was a miracle that they’d survived. A miracle and a man named Riddick. As the prayers trailed off, Carolyn drifted into a light doze.

She woke up to Jack’s voice speaking to Riddick. “A lot of questions, whoever we run into. Could even be a merc ship. So, what do we tell them about you?”

The question made her fingers tighten around the arm Riddick had wrapped around her waist. A soothing feeling flowed from his mind into hers, a balm that coated her rising anxiety. He pulled her closer against his chest and ran a hand over her hair and down her back, carefully avoiding her wounds as he pet her. She found that she liked being petted.

She felt him turn to look at Jack, the stubble of his chin catching on her hair. After a moment of thought he finally answered. “Tell them Riddick's dead. He died somewhere on that planet.”

As they flew back towards the shipping lane, Carolyn’s mind churned over thoughts and plans. She felt the passengers succumb to sleep one by one until only she and her Sentinel were awake. “Are you happy?” she asked softly.

“Me?” She felt his incredulity and scorn. “We could’ve escaped earlier with half the trouble. I almost died and you almost got eaten.”

“But we did survive. And we bonded. Are you happy?” she repeated stubbornly.

Adjusting a lever, he stopped and really thought about her question. “I guess I did get to kill Johns…” he mused, “and I ended up with you in my lap and bound to me, so sure.”

Deciding that that was probably the best she was going to get, she wiggled to get more comfortable on his lap. “Okay, nevermind, next question. How do you feel about ditching the alliteration and becoming Richard Fry to help hide you from those who’ll come looking?”

He gave her a sideways glance. “I don’t know if I want to be a kept man.”

Beneath her glare his lips twitched and widened into a full-fledged grin. She tried to pull away and stand. Riddick chuckled, pulling her firmly back down against his shaking body and trapping her in his arms. “I’ll think about it.” He rubbed his nose down hers teasingly and dropped a kiss on her lips, leaning back with his lips still curved in amusement. 

After so long as a loner, she couldn’t help but like all the touching, though he was still being rather irritating. Was this going to be the rest of her life? Him provoking her?

Riddick’s hand cupped her throat, tracing up and down her tendons. “As long as you’re the one who’s keeping me, I suppose I can get used to it.” Pressing his face against the top of her head, he breathed in deep and hummed, a faint rumble that made her skin tingle.

“Me too.” Relaxing back against his body, she petted her fingers up and down his arm. “We just need to get rescued and back to civilization. I can quit The Company and collect my back pay. After that, we’ll have the money to go find somewhere on the frontier to make our new home where they don’t care about you or your bounty. There’s always work for pilots.” She yawned and closed her eyes. 

“I like that plan,” he said softly, brushing hair off her face. He slid a lock through his fingers over and over, indulging himself in the texture, lifting it to brush across his jaw and lips. “We just have to escort Imam to New Mecca and get Shazza and Jack settled somewhere safe. Maybe Shazza will have some ideas for a good place for the four of us to put down roots.”

“Tribe first,” she agreed, circling her finger slowly around the hollow of his arm as she slid back towards sleep. 

“Guide and Tribe.” He pressed a hand over her heart, indulging his senses in the strong thump of her heartbeat.

“Sentinel and Guide,” she murmured, already half asleep. “Protect each other. Me ‘n you. Together.”

“Yeah,” he breathed, looking out at the stars with a faint smile she felt more than saw. “Together.”

THE END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading my strange take on this. I love Pitch Black a lot and hope you enjoyed this happy fix-it twist on the story and universe. Each and every comment you sent me is treasured. You’re wonderful!

**Author's Note:**

> When my friend didn’t get asked to Junior Prom in February of 2000, she asked me to go to a movie with her instead. Since I wasn’t going either as a Senior, I said yes. I had no idea what this movie was when I sat down with my hidden bag of Twizzlers and smuggled in soda pop. Pitch Black blew my mind. It wasn’t perfect, but nevertheless I was enthralled by the character development, the chemistry (both antagonistic and sexual), and how I kept getting knocked topsy turvy. We spent half the night analyzing the plot and characters and my love affair with Vin Diesel’s voice continues to this day.
> 
> The scene where Fry lifts Riddick to his feet and Riddick looks into her eyes with this vulnerable expression and she jolts and you see blood dripping in the rain you don’t know for a second if HE stabbed her. But she doesn’t look angry or regretful. She looks at him like she’s trying to tell him something important, that HE’s important. And then you realize that a monster has her as she’s yanked away into the air to die offscreen and he falls to the ground in shock and horror and denial, crying, “Not for me!” and you can see that her sacrifice guts him. That he doesn’t think he deserves it. That it means something profound to him and he’s not just shrugging this death off. That her words and actions have changed him. Moved him. Gah! It killed me. It still kills me. 
> 
> Then in the next movie he does all these amazing things to try and save Jack (who’s grown up into this unbelievably gorgeous woman named Kyra with great skin and curves despite being in prison (which bothered me but I’m probably being petty)) and fails to save her too. Sure he gets the necromonger throne, but he didn’t want that. He wanted to save Jack/Kyra and ends the movie with his hand over his face. Poor Riddick!
> 
> He deserves a fix-it. I want Riddick to succeed in saving someone and find a bit of love and happiness. I want Fry to learn from her mistakes and live to become a better person after this crucible. I want 20 years of unresolved sexual tension to be resolved. And I want to do all this through the filter of Sentinel/Guide relations.


End file.
